for HUM 160
March 20, 2007
--whatever poor excuse for a short story this is, it doesn't matter anymore what grade it got.
The deadline for her manuscript was a month ago, yet here she was still making her way through the third part of her Results and Discussions. The deadline she had to meet now was two days away. But she was already too far behind.
Minina sat in front of the computer. Her roommate was asleep. The light cream painted wooden bunk loomed over her to the right. She sat at the table where the PC was huddled in the space between the grey cabinet and the screened window. She felt her roommate shift position on the top bunk, the shadow changed.
The room was small, just enough to fit the furniture around it. A bookshelf doubled as a shoe rack welcomed visitors at the door. Behind it a double decker was their only sanctuary from depression. A table that could study two beside the lower deck held all things academic. It was cluttered with pens, papers, folders, open books, and such. Minina leaned her back on the side of the fairly medium sized cabinet which housed clothes and other things. She could hear the hum of the antique 4-feet tall refrigerator, but even though she was tempted to take a drink, she refused to get up for a cold glass of water. To the right of the refrigerator, the bathroom door was open. The small lavatory echoed the crickets and the cats from outside.
The magenta-tinted screen stared back at her. For that, she wanted to kick it. The Internet connection was slow. Forty-eight kilobytes per second felt like a horserace under water. Her email server’s page seemed to download as fast as the sky would turn indigo-orange soon. She looked out the window. It was still pitch black. She needed some sleep.
A wave of ‘if-onlys’ ran through her head. If only she had started earlier, if only she took time out in December, if only she had known that it takes more than a month to finish a BS thesis, if only she knew then what she knew now… Don’t they always say that?
Minina typed in her username and password on the tab prompt and pressed ‘enter’. The browser screen turned white again and began to download the next page. After a few minutes her inbox was flashed before her, a long list of e-mails filled the page as she scrolled down. She had maintained her account for as long as she could remember. Yes, last year even.
She clicked the link that said ‘compose’. She was going to e-mail herself again: the fool proof way for a back up. Damn that she lost her flash drive! The Rich Text Format editor slowly wiped into the screen. There were the ‘if onlys’ again… if only she didn’t waste her time, if only she could write faster, stop time or… e-mail herself where the message would be sent to a year before. If only she could e-mail the file of her manuscript to herself of last year… Wouldn’t that be exciting, she thought as she attached the manuscript file to an empty e-mail body.
“E-mail Sent.” The screen read. Minina closed the applications and shut down the computer.
The internet is a marvelous thing. Though it’s difficult to actually visualize how it gets things from one place to another. Imagine it as a highway, where gravel and asphalt is replaced by fiber optics and copper cables. The cars are ones and zeros swifting back and forth on a blue lighted street. In the sky there is a clock. But what if the clock winds back? The ones and zeros all go in the wrong direction: backward.
The deadline for her manuscript was a month ago. The deadline she had to meet now was two days away. Minina scrolled the page up and down to check if there was anything left to change for her final journal article.
Her roommate was asleep. The light cream painted wooden bunk loomed over her to the right. She sat at the table where the PC was huddled in the space between the gry cabinet and the screened window. She felt her roommate shift position on the top bunk, the shadow changed…
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