Sorry that I’ve been away for a while. The past two weeks have been a combination of busy and a serious case of writer’s block. I had been putting many extra hours of overtime work for my research assistantship this summer. The project that I am on held a conference for all of the schools with student participants—I believe we are tracking over 4,000 students over the course of five years—and I was called on for both data compilation (no easy feet for multiple variables for 40 schools) and conference logistics. I followed this by spending a weekend and a couple of days at home in the Bay Area. It could have been more, had I not been incredibly fortunate. More on that later.
The writer’s block has been particularly troublesome to deal with. I have never been much of a writer (it’s even amusing to me to think of myself as one, but I guess that’s what we are doing here), so it’s been stumping me how to overcome it. I would think of some ideas of topics to write… but never felt like I could fully flush anything out. But I think I’ve got something to share today, as I’m on a plane passing Mt. Shasta to my right on my way to Eugene via Portland. Which almost didn’t happen.
A friend in the program has dubbed the some everyday, life-saving situations related to graduate school as “grad school miracles.” She was one of the first to experience these grad school miracles, of course. She had been working on a literature review for her advisor in the Knight Library—the main library at the University of Oregon. During the last few weeks of each term, the library is opened for a 24 hour period of time, accommodating for students cramming for exams and completing assignments. The friend had apparently scanned articles to be reviewed and saved her document to the computer she had been working on (her laptop, at the time, was on a serious decline), but had failed to send it or save it to another source.
Much like at Colby, the computers wiped themselves clean overnight on a 24 hour basis. The morning after my friend had put in tremendous amounts of hard work, she realized that she, personally, did not have a copy of that work available to her. I’m sure she felt an immediate sense of dread: the one where you curse yourself for being so stupid, your heart drops into a pit in your stomach, and you can only look up at the sky and question your foolishness. Personally, I also drop a number of f-bombs. My friend probably sprinted her way back to the library to try to get to the computer she was working on the previous day. A student was at the same computer, and the way my friend described it, you could tell that she had been working there for a long time. There were multiple Red Bulls, stacks of books, and paper was scattered everywhere.
My friend asked the student if she could check the computer for her lost documents, fearing that the computer had indeed wiped itself clean. The student browsed through multiple files before finding that all of my friend’s work was still on the computer. Because the computer had been in use since the previous evening, it hadn’t been cleared of any lingering documents. My friend saved everything and emailed it to herself. She proclaimed her first “grad school miracle.”
Since this term has been introduced, there have been a number of grad school miracles. Personally, I had a couple of them. For instance, I was able to salvage an excruciatingly difficult assignment, when I though I had messed it up completely. A different friend—a master’s student—just obtained a research assistantship, even when master’s students hardly ever received full funding through the school. Grad school miracles do exist, even when you might feel like everything around you is lost or crumbling.
I had a grad school miracle today, though I’m not particularly proud of it. I was on my way to the Oakland airport, planning on catching a flight to Eugene from home. I had purposefully booked to leave today, as it is the day after my mom’s birthday, and about the only time I could allot myself after pulling those extra hours for Conference preparation. I’m sure they expected me at the office, but I wanted to be able to spend extra time in the Bay. So I was absolutely excited when I booked a flight back to Eugene for a $106, even though non-Allegiant Air flights (which are super cheap, Oakland to Eugene), generally cost well over $150. At the time of my booking, debt ceiling negotiations were still occurring and the Federal Aviation Administration was not collecting taxes on flights. Some airlines were bumping up prices and pocketing the extra fare costs. Alaska Airlines, which I am flying currently, was one of the few airlines that were passing the savings onto the customer. I was excited.
But I got to the airport this morning, and I had difficulty inputing my confirmation number. Which seemed really unusual—flying back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast had made me a relative expert on handling everything airport related. So I went to the line facing ticket counter, and looked at my pre-boarding printout.
I had that realization. I had booked for August 16th. Yesterday. Fuck.
I couldn’t believe my idiocy as I went to the counter to explain my situation. They re-directed me to call customer service—they couldn’t book me at the ticket counter anymore*. So when I called, I encountered a very bitchy customer service representative who essentially was yelling at me to explain that I was going to have to pay $313 to book a flight to Eugene. And that she could not give me any credit for my flight that I had paid for the previous day because the airlines had cancelled my ticket since I had failed to show up. Needless to say, she wasn’t who I needed to deal with.
After calling Gillian, Mom, and Dad, there were a number of possible solutions. I could take a train for $130, a bus for $80, or rebook for the $313. All sounded like terrible options. I tried to plead my case to the ticket counter again, asking them to just send me to Portland and I would pay the $140 ticket from Portland to Eugene. No go.
So, with basically no hope left, I tried calling customer service again, hoping that a different person would be on the other end of the line. A woman named Kelly picked up, and she was immediately more sympathetic than the other, heartless woman. She said she could book me on the flight that was leaving in 40 minutes that was leaving for Portland and put me on a flight to Eugene, arriving at the same time that I would have gotten in on the previous day. She was going to charge me $25 for a same-day change fee. I had to ask her twice to be sure if it was okay, and if it was still going to get me to Portland and then Eugene. Kelly, goddess divine, had saved my day, as well as my checking account.
Grad school miracle.
*By the way, how stupid is that? That is completely dumb and not useful at all. Who was the idiot that made that decision?
