Bit of Ivory

Man, am I glad I bought that laptop a week ago. Today would have been an absolute DISASTER without it. Okay, get this. I’ve got a group project due in my Modern American Usage class today. We’ve known about it all semester, right? Each group is supposed to pick 20 usage items to research, do a report on them, and then make up 5 exercises for each item, making a total of 100 exercises. Well, okay, cool. My group had 4 girls in it. We each got 5 items to do. We were supposed to bring them all on Tuesday. But, knowing me, I put it off until the last second, and promptly got too busy the night before to do my part. So I thought, “well, I’ll just offer to put them all together, that way it’s a punishment for not getting done when I was supposed to be, and I have two more days to finish!”

Good plan, right? Well, it would have been–except my roommate doesn’t own a computer, and she had a big term paper due as well. And while I now have a laptop, I didn’t buy a new copy of WordPerfect (I can’t STAND Word, but that’s another story for another day), because the license allows me to install it on two computers. Only problem is, the program can’t be running on both computers at the same time. Before you think I’m *that* uptight about the law, I was all ready to use both computers, but it wouldn’t have done any good anyway, because I was way too busy to do anything homework-related at all. I had a choir concert on Tuesday night, which lasted until 9:30, and after it was over I went back to my apartment and had cake with my mom who had driven down. By the time she left (and Gilmore Girls was over, which we taped), I was too exhausted to do anything. Then last night, I worked from 1-4, then again from 6-10, and barely had enough time in between to check my e-mail and eat dinner.

So, I get home from work at 10:15, and instead of working on the project, I sit down an gossip with the roomies about the Harry Potter fanfiction they’re all writing (I am the only one with no plot bunnies for a story of my own, although I’ve come up with some good ideas for their’s), and don’t get started on the project until about 11:30, at which time I check my e-mail to get the other girls’ parts, which they were supposed to e-mail to me. And guess what! One of the girls FORGOT to include her excercises! So I e-mail her, hoping she’ll get it, and
stay up till 1:30 writing my own history parts, but waiting on the exercises, since I had a break from 11:00 to 12:00, which was when the report was due. That, and I just couldn’t stay awake any longer.

I wake up this morning, lug my laptop to campus, and go to my first class, which is at ten, and then head over to the library to finish up my part, hoping that there were exercises waiting in my inbox. Well, once I’d plugged in and booted up my laptop, guess what!?! No exercises! So I waste some time online (Arguing with Teri over who was the greatest procrastinator in the world. I’ve decided it’s a tie. Haven’t heard back from Teri yet), and then wrote my exercises. At this point, it is 11:50, and no exercises have arrived in my inbox. There wasn’t enough time to print the thing even without them, so I just packed up my laptop and went to class, hoping the other girl would be there and that my teacher would be in a lenient mood (she usually is, so I wasn’t too worried). The other girl was there, and hadn’t gotten my e-mail, and didn’t realize the exercises were due at the same time as the report. So I open up my laptop, stick it on her desk, and let her make them up on the spot. The teacher said that as long as they were done by the end of class, it would be all right, and that I could e-mail them to her and she would print them, so I wouldn’t have to pay for the paper. Luckily, there was an ethernet port in the classroom, so I attached the file and e-mailed them to my teacher.

After class, I went with my teacher to her office, where we attempted to print the file. Only problem is, she’s got a Mac, and while she has WordPerfect for Macintosh, for some reason it didn’t want to read the file. So I got out my floppy, and we try again. No dice. So finally I walked down to the computer lab, paid $1.40 (10 cents a page) to print out the stupid thing, walked back up to her office, and handed it in.

What a nightmare. But it’s done, and my laptop was a lifesaver, and I am duly grateful that my dad would lend me the money to buy it a week ago.

I might point out that this whole thing was only slightly due to my procrastination, since the other girls didn’t send me their stuff until I was already at work, which means I couldn’t have done it until after ten anyway, which means the girl who forgot her exercises wouldn’t have gotten the e-mail, since she last checked it at 9:30. So I still say that you should never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until next week.

Now I need to go read 2 books for editing that I was supposed to be reading all semester and that I have a book report due on Saturday for. But just think! Today was the last day of class until September! Whoo-hoo!