Gentleman, meet Lug.

Not a big deal? Not a big deal?! I was given the impression by some
people that this report for the Bank would not be a big deal. They
were incorrect.

So I woke up with final comments waiting for me from one of my bosses
on the paper I was hoping to submit to the World Bank this morning.
So I start working on it at home. Then the power goes out, so I pack
up real quick and bike to the office and turn on the generator. After
a couple hours, I finish. I save two copies of the paper, and go to
attach it to an e-mail to the Bank. But when I open the file again,
every single table in the paper has been corrupted and is now just a
long list of numbers. I can't recover it, so I start over. Then the
generator runs out of gas. Quick, my laptop has a thirty second
battery life. There's no gas in the cans in the hallway. I'll go buy
some. Shit, I have no money. I'll get some from the safe. Shit, I
don't have the keys to get to the safe. So I sprint home, get money
and keys, and ask a guard from the office to buy me some gas. I
finish the report again, only this time as I go to send it, there's a
new e-mail from the Bank saying they don't have the funding they
promised for our company, so my boss says to hold off on sending them
the report. Ack!

This is how a normal day around the office is, only usually there
aren't hard deadlines, so you can just go with the flow and laugh
about how nothing works. Today was a little different. On the
positive side, I have now finally written a real paper/report on which
I am the sole author. It's certainly not publishable (in fact, it and
all my thoughts and my firstborn belong to the Bank) but it might
eventually lead to something. I also had a totally dorky
epistemological insight while working to incorporate two different
professors' comments on the paper: "Wow, Thomas Kuhn is totally
right." (If you get that joke, thumbs up for being at least as dorky
as me. Also thumbs up to those who caught the Willow allusion to
start. And in all seriousness the profs were a huge help.)

F--- it all, I'm going to Mombasa.

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