Re: Hi
Dear Kevin,
Thank you for letting me know of the many problems you’ve been experiencing with your term paper. As you say yourself, you should have made a backup at an early point and saved it externally; computers do crash. There are a number of options. Being left with nothing but your initial notes must have been quite a blow. Still, rewriting the paper probably resulted in a better second draft.
The break-in must have been more difficult to foresee—there’s no need to blame yourself. If the lock wasn’t reliable, what more could you have done than ask your landlord to have it replaced? I suppose it’s fortunate that nothing else was stolen—after all, a USB stick is in itself no great loss. Too bad you couldn’t find the file on the computer you’d been using at the library. Perhaps some fellow student trashed it. Actually, someone may even have copied it first in order to pass it off as their own work. When you hand in yours, I’ll check with my colleagues in case one of them has received a similar paper.
I do find it somewhat careless of you, though, to leave the only copy of your next—handwritten—version in your car after these early mishaps, but what’s done is done. I understand that you were unfamiliar with the neighbourhood and had no reason to expect that the car would get broken into or stolen. Who wants an eighteen-year-old Lada? Well, someone did, obviously. Nor could you have known that the thief would set fire to it when he abandoned it. I understand too that seeing him in the driver’s seat as you came out of the building must have been something of a shock, which is probably why you reacted the way you did. Your effort to pull the door open and grab the paper on the seat just as he took off was brave but rather foolhardy—you were lucky to suffer no other injuries than a fracture.
In passing, your reference to “the slings and arrows of misfortune” is actually a misquote and also, I believe, based on a misunderstanding of the word “slings”. Partly for that reason it’s not really appropriate to your situation. Had it been, you should have been more careful: always check your quotes and make sure you use quotation marks. Acknowledge your sources.
That applies, of course, particularly to the final version of your paper, which is why I mention it. I realize that typing with your left arm in a cast will be awkward, but I’m sure you’ll manage. The email you sent was proof of that. And, to end on a positive note, as I implied above, most papers that are given top grades go through a number of drafts, each an improvement on the one before. I look forward to receiving yours.
The deadline is still Nov 30.
All the best,
Edwin Gilbert
Lecturer