Stark Raving Terror
By A tale of horror and redemption from the Washington Post:
When Linda Cerniglia went back to school, it took her almost seven years to get through all the prerequisites, the labs, the research. And it took a thief just moments to grab her purse, with the only copy of her master’s thesis stored on a tiny jump drive inside.
Hold the snide remarks about not backing up your thesis, and consider the true horror of this. Your thesis is gone. Gone. Gone. All that work, gone. I might have just had a heart attack at that point. Read on…
She designed an experiment, analyzed CT scans, ran statistics, studied research and — slowly — began to write her thesis.
“It was so painful,” she said. “I would rather go outside and dig a hole all day long than write.”
She tried to trick herself into working on it, by going to a coffee shop or finding a sunny picnic table in the park. She could use a computer anywhere, because she had all the research on a jump drive, a tiny, portable memory-storage device about the size of a cigarette lighter.
Heh. How true. I wonder if it would be easier re-writing the thesis, given that you’ve already broken down the mental barriers necessary to put something into words. My guess is no; from my experience of losing posts on Blogger or long e-mails, I can report that I usually just get bitter and angry, sometimes returning to an idea, sometimes not. For a whole thesis, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to say that I’d bag the whole thing after losing a hundred pages or so, but it would be really, really difficult for me to go on. Anyway…
That night she couldn’t sleep, tortured by visions of her lost jump drive. The next morning, Cerniglia began to think about what she would do if she were the thief. Get out of there fast, speed out on the Beltway, then dump the purse.
There was a chance, just a chance.
She was going to retrace his steps, go to every store he hit. She would talk to security guards, check lost-and-found, scour the parking lots.
So that day, she drove to Greenbelt, and as soon as she parked she saw a big trash bin behind a Wendy’s, like a beacon. It was perfect. “It was open. It was hidden. I thought, ‘That’s it — if it’s going to be anywhere, it’s going to be there.’ “
She started pulling out broken-down boxes. She didn’t care about the trash, even if it was greasy slop from a fast-food place. “No cockroach, no rat, no creature from the dark was going to keep me from my jump drive,” she said. “Nothing is as bad as the thought of rewriting that thesis.”
She saw a flash of aqua cloth. Her heart pounded — it looked like her workout pants. “Then I see my gym bag. I jumped into the dumpster. I’m throwing things out of the way. I see my driver’s license.”
And there, at the bottom, was her black leather purse. She unzipped it, reached in, and felt her fingers close around — her jump drive.
People driving by stared: A 5-foot-4 43-year-old woman jumping up and down in a trash bin, screaming.
The obvious lesson is to back up early and often. All of my relevant files are on my home desktop, my laptop, my work desktop, and in cyberspace. The second lesson is that the proper response to having the only copy of your thesis stolen is not a two week bender, which would have been my solution, but rather a carefully thought out and efficiently executed recovery plan.