Writing recommenced in February, when the bustle to put out conference notes in early March had larger passed away from this lowly graduate student performing studies and become a thing of editorial boards and professors. I ended up having a couple of weeks at CERN during which I could focus on writing, but this lovely time ended at the beginning of March when I had to pack up and move back to the United States, to complete my dissertation and prepare for my defense in a place where people couldn't come lean over my desk in my not-cubicle and ask more questions. At the time, I had drafted about five and a half chapters of my thesis*, two of which my professor had seen. I anticipated writing at eight total.
I despise moving. I have nightmares about airports and air travel. This move was putting some significant distance between me and my fiance. It was a stressful time. But I survived the apartment-emptying and stuff-packing and luggage-weighing and goodbye-saying to find myself arriving at the Geneva airport very early in the morning after a painless taxi ride and handing over my luggage with no complaints at all about weight. It was marvelous. I settled into my seat for the nine hour flight, and allowed myself to watch a movie before thinking that I should really be good and convert some more of notes into actual dissertation text. I opened my laptop bag (which also contained my headset, webcam, camera, and several books and other electronics; I was moving after all) and saw this:
Never has a more horrifying sight met my eyes.
I sat shocked in my seat before my mind restarted and tried to figure out WHERE WAS MY LAPTOP?!?!?! My immediate terror was that it had been stolen, but a few moments of reflection presented a different theory. I had been pulled aside during security screening so that my backpack could be checked (yes, it was stuffed with electronic gizmos, I was moving after all) and the guy checking my backpack had helped me move all the grey bins of my stuff out of the main line. I guessed that in stacking those bins to move them, my laptop had gotten covered and I had walked off without it. So it hadn't been stolen.
It just might well be before I managed to reclaim it, though!
We were four hours into a nine hour flight. The flight attendants told me they couldn't contact the Geneva airport about this and I would need to call them when I landed. I landed on the east coast at noon, or at six p.m. in Geneva, after the end of business hours. It was a very, very, very, very long five hours.
Once on the ground, I started making phone calls to try and get someone to call the Geneva airport, as I had another flight to catch. When I did finally arrive in my U.S. place of residence that night, though, it was too late to do anything. Within two days, though, I was in touch with the special section of the lost and found that handles electronics, because apparently a couple dozen laptops a day get left at the Geneva security check-points. I think I am frightened by that statistic. Still, they had my laptop, and I was able to arrange for one of my CERN-based colleagues to pick it up from the airport for me.
This didn't put my laptop any closer to me, and because shipping electronics like that is prohibitively expensive, I ended up having to wait until my own adviser took his next trip to CERN and brought it back to me. I went without it for three weeks. This made for very, very, very quiet weekends (no internet, no TV, no computer . . . I rediscovered books--oh, and read stuff for my thesis, and the thesis itself, of course).
But, wait! My thesis was on that laptop, after arriving in early March, I basically had a month to get it finished and out to committee. I didn't have my thesis for three of those four and a half weeks. But it was okay, because in my purse I had this little gizmo:
This was my new favorite toy. I had bought it because it seemed like a good idea to have my dissertation stored on more than one piece of hardware; while I could have backed it up to a few online places, not needing a network or internet connection appealed to me. At the time of my laptop's extended European vacation without me, my jump drive had up-to-date versions of 3.5 of my 5.5 chapters, and older versions of the other two. So I continued to work on my thesis, though with several pieces of it in different places. My adviser had to take on faith that I was making progress, because I couldn't send him new entire finished chapters until I put the pieces back together.
He returned my laptop to me on a Friday morning. I sent him seven chapters that evening, or a thesis missing only one major section.
Moral of the story 1: Double-check that your electronics are in their cases after leaving security and before boarding the plane.
Moral of the story 2: USB drives make excellent Christmas gifts for about-to-graduate graduate students.
*I tend to use the words thesis and dissertation interchangeably, as does every English speaker I know in my field. "Thesis" has fewer syllables. To clarify, let me say here that any time I am referring to my thesis or dissertation, I mean the large document I had to write and defend to get my doctoral degree. I never wrote a master's thesis.
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