perspective

This morning I bumped into one of the tutors for the course in which I've been lecturing semiotics, and asked him how his dissertation hand-in went a couple of weeks ago. Hand-ins are hell: my PhD deadline was the 14th February, adding Valentine's Day trauma to last-minute write-up and photocopy shop stupidity angst. I thought I had it bad. This year the hand-in deadline, with impeccable timing, was in the middle of the first batch of power cuts. This lad did last-minute edits by candlelight, presumably on a print-out, with his work locked on a power-dead hard drive. I think I would have given up at that point, actually, and tried a career change to something less heart-breaking and traumatic, like writing for You magazine, or spin-doctoring Scientology.