Drop the puck!

Dissertation color commentary has been drawing international traffic to the SJBlog, as if I didn't have a big enough head already. How is it that turning in a stack of paper can be so thrilling?

But, if it's blow-by-blow dissertation news that you want, by God, I'll deliver.

This morning I got the second of three signatures, this one from my outside reader, who told me this incredible story about her own dissertation filing nightmare at Yale. Seems she was working off some gigantic mainframe back in the era of punch cards and all that, and she accidentally erased both of the copies of her final draft at 5 am the morning she needed to file, as her husband sat idling in the car outside, waiting to drive them both the 3000 miles to Berkeley. This being before such things as the Geek Squad, she assumed there would be no way to retrieve her dissertation from the bowels of the mainframe, and so she ended up paying someone to retype the whole damn thing from the last hard copy she had, marked up with edits.

Five minutes after I heard this story, I was in the lab, printing out my dissertation on my acid free archival 100% cotton bonded thesis paper, waiting for something to go wrong.

But the only thing that went even remotely awry was an error message from Microsoft Word: "There are too many spelling and grammatical errors in the file 'Dissertation' for Microsoft Word to continue to display them." That's right, Microsoft Word, I write in other languages. Eat it.

Will SJB get the last signature? Will her margins be off when she goes to file? What happens if they run out of lollipops at the Degrees office? How many beers will she drink once that sucker is filed? Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion to the SJBlog Saga of the Doctorate: Battle of the Readers: All Hail the Mighty Acid-Free Paper!!