Soapbox

Only for Good

Crisis averted!  Supermom saves the world yet again!
Film at 11:00.

     This is the on-going story of Katie and the 3,000 word essay. I think, before it’s all done, telling it may take considerably more than 3,000 words.

    Ted and I were in bed asleep last night when Katie came home from her cast party, and I was awakened by the sound of her obviously upset, crying. (I still waken quickly at the sound of a crying child.)  I found her in her room in tears, turning out her pockets, and she sobbed out her story.
   Quick background:  Katie has to write a 3,000 word essay  about her senior theater project for her International Baccalaureat diploma. It is worth 1/4 of her theater grade for IB, so it’s a big deal, and messing it up could harm her chances of getting that diploma she has worked so hard for. The seniors were told by their theater teacher that the paper was due in early May. And then Friday, as they were gearing up for that night’s performance of the school musical, the teacher told them "Oh wait- it turns out that paper is due Monday. Sorry."
     Sorry? You’re sorry?

    As you can imagine, students were hyperventilating right and left. Since the paper is for the IB portfolio, the teacher doesn’t have any real latitude on the due date. They have to be mailed off to Venezuela or wherever to be graded by the mysterious and all- powerful grand high Poobahs of International Baccalaureate. The teachers, confronted no doubt with a row of tear-streaked faces, decided they could put the due date off until Wednesday morning if they express shipped them, but that was the very best they could do. And of course the kids all have the play Friday and Saturday nights.
    Once her initial panic was over, Katie, being an eager beaver, sat down with my little laptop and wrote over half of her essay Saturday afternoon.  She saved it onto a flash drive rather than onto my laptop, so she could also work on it on the other computer. She had a really early call for the play and figured she’d end up sitting around a lot, so she tucked the flashdrive and my computer into her messenger bag, grabbed her other stuff and off she went. As it happened, she never had an opportunity to use the computer. When she got home after the cast party she went to unpack her gear and discovered that the flashdrive was not in the messenger bag. This is where I found her.

    "My paper is gone!!" she sobbed. "It was like half-written! It must have fallen out of my bag at the theatre!! But the building is locked now, and I can’t wait until Monday for them to unlock the building to do more work on my paper! All that work is wasted!!"  She was literally pulling at her hair, distressed, distraught, disconsolate.

   Well, it was bad news for sure but, being parents, we were not nearly as impressed with the apocalyptic nature of the situation as she wanted us to be. However, being parents, we got out of bed, turned on the lights and rolled up our sleeves anyway. I told her (uselessly) to calm down and started to looking around the house  in case it never made it to the theater while Ted turned on my laptop to see if he could find any traces of the paper on it.
    "I didn’t save it on there!" she protested.
    "Nevertheless" he said, and proceeded to do… that thing he does with computers, which looks so much like what I do and yet is utterly different. Sure enough, he unearthed a partial copy which the computer had made when she accidentally closed it down w/o saving at some point. Apparently the computer does an emergency back-up in such instances, but you have to know where to find it, and super-dad knew.  It was only about half of what she had written, but it was a good beginning.

   So, doom at least half-mitigated, Katie was able to take a deep breath and realized that perhaps her entire last 2 years of school work were not a crash and burn after all.  She called her theater teacher right away and asked her if she could meet her at the school this morning and let her in to look for the thing. ("Which she damn well can!" I thought, as she was the one who messed up the dates to begin with) Visions of me on my hands and knees with a flashlight, crawling row by row through the auditorium were dancing in my head. What fun!
     Meanwhile I kept looking. Katie was resogned that all that could be done had been and went upstairs to brush her teeth for bed while I stood in the living room and did a "Monk". I surveyed the room slowly and envisioned Katie putting the computer in the bag, and probably setting it down while she gathered other things… where would she have put it?… I walked over to the big chair near the front door and lifted the small pile of folded laundry that was on the seat, shook them carefully…. and a small blue flashdrive slid out onto the cushion.
     I caught my breath. How many blue flashdrives do we have in this house? I wondered. How would I know? I’ve never even used one.  I slid it under the bathroom door, knocked, and told Katie to look down.
     "Oh my God where did you find it??!" she shrieked (and dropped a blob of toothpaste out of her mouth)

   Crisis averted, flashdrive found, supermom saves world once again! Ted popped it in my laptop and verified that it was the right one and had the paper on it, then promptly transfered the file to 3 different computers so that if we woke up this morning and poltergeists had crashed one of them during the night, she could still retrieve it from another machine.
     "Well, who has the greatest parents in the world?" I asked my smiling daughter as I finally went upstairs to go to back to bed at 12:30.
     "Pretty much me" she said.
     "Pretty much you?" Huh.

      All I can say it- thank goodness I use my powers only for good!