Computer Meltdown — Part One

It all started Tuesday night.  I was working on my last final paper of undergrad and I was working at the receptionist desk of a recovery center; so I had access to a computer in order to finish the essay that was due the next day by noon.  

            And the thing is, I had not even picked a topic yet.  So by the time work rolled around at 4 pm I was just beginning to assemble something.

            Still, after writing one full page of the topic I did choose, I wanted to scrap it and start over.

            By 9pm I was rushing out the door of my job, without a paper and without a topic.

            9:45 I arrived home.

            By midnight I was ready to write the paper.

            It was gonna be an all-nighter.           

            Meanwhile a few weeks back I had spilt a glass of water on my laptop, so the only way for it to work properly was if I plugged it into my TV in the bedroom and use that screen as my desktop.

*Brief timeout from the story for a few pictures of what you might be imagining my computer looked like.

            So I was in my bedroom, plugged into he TV, and by 1:00 I said to myself, “I am going to sleep.”

            I set my alarm at 20-minute intervals and kept shutting it down, pressing snooze until 3am chimed on the screen.

Okay! Let’s do this thing.

4:20 comes, so I take a break.  And by 4:39 I get tired of writing.

I text my mom then — she is in the other room — asking her to wake me when she leaves for work at 7:20.  I text my dad too, for insurance/ assurance.

With that wake-up call in motion, I go to sleep for the rest of my short night.

7:20 ­— I get up to lock the door behind my mother’s back.  And when I get back to my room to finish my now 5-page essay, I do not know for the life of me how to end this thing, so I go to sleep.  Plus, my bed feels too good.

At 8am I decide it is time!

As the hours weeded away closer to 11:30 — the time my uncle and I set to drive to school to hand in the stupid paper — I still could not create the last two pages.  I did not know how to wrap this thing up.

I decided on emailing my professor and telling him I got called into work (which wasn’t a complete lie) and that I would not be home until later that night.  I asked him if he would rather I email it to him, or else I could hand it in tomorrow (Thursday) at noon.  He said, “drop off tomorrow.”  I do not even think his sentence was punctuated with a period.

But I was relieved.

My new goal, now, was to finish the essay by the time I left work.

At 9:06pm I was printing out two copies of the report for the class and for my mother.

But the bag I brought to work was too small and I was going out to meet someone when I returned to Queens (the reason I wanted to be done by the end of work) so I left the copies in my desk.

When finally I got home, I could relax in the fact that I was completely done with this essay and one step closer to being finished with undergrad!