You're typing along, almost done with that big paper that took you all semester to write, and BAM. Your computer crashes. The screen goes black and nothing you do will turn it back on. On the verge of breaking out into a panic attack, you run to IT praying they can save your files, or even just that one major paper. They rip into your computer, pulling this and that out and replacing it with new pieces, thinking maybe that will solve the problem. They turn it on, bringing your computer back to life and giving you a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe your life isn't over. Then it freezes. It won't load, it won't get past the opening screen. That little glimmer of hope has just been drenched by the reality that your laptop, in particular your hard drive, is toast. It's okay, though, because just that previous night you went out and bought an external hard drive and backed every single thing on that computer up. Your paper is sure to be on there and not too far from where you last were. It's fine.
So, IT replaces your hard drive and brings your laptop back from the dead. You then put everything back onto your computer from the external hard drive and pull up your paper. It's not your paper. Well, it's the basis of your big paper, but not the paper itself. You panic, opening up every single file that could possibly contain the one thing you need to graduate. Then, you slowly lift your head from the screen, all emotions and color just gone, like your paper. You still have faith, though, that somewhere within your external hard drive lies your paper, just the way you left it. You open every file, every folder, but it's nowhere to be found. Great. Just great.
By this time you're contemplating if it's even worth graduating even though you're just a month away from being done. Do you really need that piece of paper? Do you really need to graduate as an honors student? What's the worst they can do for not completing the last step in the honors program? Make you stay another year or so to take all the general courses you got to skip because of honors? HA ha...ha... WHERE IS THE PAPER???
After searching for a solid hour, you give up, at least for the moment, and decide you'll just write the last section you needed before the paper was complete, before you lost it all. It's fine. You'll get to it eventually even though today marks exactly one month until it's due and you haven't made your presentation or had it read yet. Everything's fine. You're typing away, making sure to save every thirty seconds, and you gain hope. You just pounded out almost 600 words in a matter of thirty minutes, so you'll definitely get everything you lost done in a day. Then you realize that the part you lost was entirely research based. Every summary of every article you pulled and every piece of literature you had; it was that section you lost. Back into eternal depression you go. So you decide you're going to push it off until the last possible moment because you just don't want to have to deal with the horribleness that was writing that section in the first place. #BecauseHonors
Basically, the moral of this story is that internal hard drives are literal crap and, even if you back everything up onto an external hard drive, you are sure to lose the most important document you have. If you need me, I'll be contemplating my life and whether this all really matters.
