About two months ago actually,
I had to write a paper for history. Specifically on Russian History. Even more specifically, as to why Lenin's side beat the combined forces of the greens, whites, and foreign powers.
We had six weeks to write it - because it was a 2500 word essay. All's going well at 3 weeks, I've got all my resources ready to put together, I've downloaded a few E-books on Russian history, borrowed a few books from my history teacher. Methodically, labouriously, I wrote out various quotes and typed them up, ready to start writing.

By the fourth week, I had a rough draft of the first five paragraphs. All's cruisy, thinks I. I've backed up the draft onto my USB, because, for some strange reason - my cd burner has stopped working. No matter though - because I'm around at the same place as everybody else. So started writing my essay, very happy at the way things were working out.

Fifth week, disaster.
My laptop, shat itself. Spectacularly. Could not retrieve anything. Discovered that my USB had been corrupted the last time I'd saved something onto it - so couldn't get my essay from that either. And my CD burner hadn't worked when I'd tried to back up onto disk.

Fuck.
2000 words down the drain.

Did I mention this essay was worth 12.5% of my coursework for this class? fail this - and you lose a BIG chunk of marks.

In a panic, I explain to my history teacher what has happened and get an extension of a weekend. Not a week - a weekend.

Frantically, I go through everything I had that was handwritten, reborrowed all the books I had, used my mum's laptop to retype it. But somehow, I can't remember a thing I'd written. I knew the general gist of what had been typed, but for the life of me, I could not remember it.

So I type. And type. And type. And my brain feels like sluggish mush that gets fed to babies, and I get little papercuts all over my hands from flicking through my notes so quickly. By the time I finish the essay, I feel so sick of the damn sight of it, that I just print it, staple it together, and hand it into my teacher, and walked off, thinking it was crap and that I'd lost that 12.5%. I'd been so sure it hadn't been as good as my last one.

I scraped an A, and got the comment "You work a lot better under stress then you think. Relax." written at the top of my paper.
(Poppet some assembly required., Sat 15 Aug 2009, 1:39, 1 reply)

Wait...
Surely beter advice would have been "You work better under stress than you think. Stress more."
(jonh, Sun 16 Aug 2009, 11:42, closed)