Lost and Found.
December 14th 2004
I love finding things. I think that would be my ideal job, to find stuff for other people, be it actual concrete objects or information about something or someone or sometime. Some time? Whatever, it looks more symmetrical that way so I like it better.
Today I indirectly helped a friend discover her dissertation notes, which had been lost in the flood. We looked everywhere for this filing cabinet, and 4 months later had becomed resigned to the fact that the cabinet was gone.
On the way back from picking up exams that were written in DS, I popped into the department office, and J. said that we should go and look at the stuff in the rooms downstairs and label our orphaned furniture for eventual relocation back in with our new offices.
So I went down with J. and G. and we walked through the department, and saw all the new cabinetry and the new floors and everything, and then we ended up in one large lecture room which is acting like a temporary holding area. Immediately when I walked in the door, I looked over and saw one file cabinet in a sea of cabinets and said “That’s M.’s cabinet!” I ran over to it, climbing over some other furniture and it was! This cabinet has been the focus of a huge hunt for months, and it suddenly turns up. So we called M. and told her to get up to the campus as fast as she could, and we called the locksmith to come and open the cabinet.
J. had to go and organise some other moving related issues, so I camped out in the room and waited for M. and the locksmith. M. darted into the room soon after and when she saw the cabinet her face changed so much. She’s really borne the burden of this over the past 4 months. It’s all research she was planning on publishing, and now that she has her professor job here, and one year of that under her belt, she was really looking forward to getting a bunch of publications into the pipeline. Losing her dissertation notes, which are not totally replaceable was something that almost destroyed her. Seeing that cabinet, and then the files inside took so much strain off her face it was unbelievable. She can now jump back in and now no longer has to try to reconstruct missing materials.
So she’s at home with her notes, and I feel really great. Happy early Christmas, M.!