The Price of Freedom: $150. The Journey: Priceless

Corrupted files, crashing software, missing data, disappearing acts, pain in the arse formatting, bad printing - all in a day's (actually several full days and nights) work to write up an MBA dissertation. Everything I knew would go wrong did. No surprise, my techno(less) karma is here in full force.

1. thinking I could get away from software errors and the dreaded "Word is unable to save due to insufficient memory" with a powerful macbook - Wrong.

2. thinking that MS Word will not crash in a mac - even more Wrong.

3. knowing that formatting the entire document is going to be a real pain (especially with bad page break and font controls) - Ouch ouch and triple ouch.

4. suspecting the table of contents is going to be more trouble than its worth - can microsoft make our lives any harder?

5. suspecting files will go missing or data lost - Without a doubt.

6. suspecting something will go wrong in printing - do I need to say more?

7. suspecting I will end up paying more than I needed to - Desperate times need desperate measures.

8. suspecting I will have problems uploading the file to the University - 'enuff said.

9. suspecting I will end up submitting the wrong file for printing and uploading - Damn friggin' right.

So there it is. My not.without.pain journey of the last 5 days and 5 nights (and wee hours of morning). The most amazing and I still cannot believe it happened part is how at 1am in the morning, when I am still revved up and alert with the adrenalin rush, I make final modifications to my document, save save and double save in both mac and thumb just to be super anal and sure, the document I finally print out and upload is still the "previous version". I mean like HUH?? how is this even possible when saving and replacing (overwriting) the previous version should be a fail-safe way to g'tee previous versions are totally wiped out? Apparently not when techno(less) bad karma me is the one writing the document. Too late now since the dissertation has already been bound.

Nonetheless, at least it's over now. I've regained my freedom, am $150 poorer (and a lot of time invested). And know what, it could have cost me only $40 if I submitted the journal 2 days ahead for binding and had it printed it at my office for free - yes, typical Singapore exploiting office assets. But procrastination always wins. At least Ultrasupplies saved the day. These printers are real pros. Really. (psst, for 60 cents per coloured page these printers are really turning in the profits).