"Lucky" Break

In high school, as an International Baccalaureate requirement, students had to write a thesis. Students were expected to turn in the final thesis on a certain date after having to turn in the beginning portions of it, including topic, argument and sources at different deadlines. I had chosen to discuss existentialism and its effect on Latin American Literature.  I hadn’t really had time to finish my thesis and one day before the deadline for the finished product I had yet to even come remotely close to calling it a finished product. I had been working on other projects, including the cases for Economics and Literary analysis for English and Spanish.  We were granted use of the computers in the school library for our thesis and most of us had used that resource at some point in time.

The deadline came and I went to school knowing that I would be in a lot of trouble. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before trying to come up with a good excuse and good arguments to convince my thesis supervisor to grant me more time. I was a nervous wreck and on the verge of tears and to top it off I was late. As I was walking through the classroom door, trying to decide if I should just tell my home room teacher (who just happened to be my thesis supervisor) immediately or wait till he asked for the thesis, he announced that he was aware that the library computers had crashed and all the saved documents had been lost. I just stopped in my tracks, and just stood there in the middle of the classroom. He then proceeded to say that all the thesis supervisors had met last evening and decided to allow an extra week for students to turn in their thesis because of the crashed computer system and to allow the students to rewrite what they had lost.

The pressure and stress buildup for me reached its boiling point and I just began to cry, and I mean cry, right there in the middle of the classroom, everybody looking at me. I didn’t say a word, my thesis, or really the beginnings of my thesis were safely saved in my own computer at home, not in the library’s crashed system.  Mr. Wallace, my homeroom teacher and thesis supervisor approached me immediately and told me it would be ok and that if I needed more than a week to rewrite my thesis he would work with me. I said nothing, just cried and softly nodded my head, understanding that he assumed I was crying because of all my lost hard work. I said nothing to convince him otherwise. I let him assume what he wanted to believe. I did not really discuss anything about the incident or the thesis because I didn’t want to blatantly lie.

That weekend however, and the week that followed, I worked non-stop on my thesis and even added more to it, possibly fueled by guilt of my omission. I did finish it in time and I turned it in on the new established deadline. I never said a word to anybody, even to classmates or friends. I took it as a “break” or second chance. Mind you though, I did not use the library’s computers ever again, just in case karma wanted some payback.