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Sep 11, 2008

Preparing

As you move through your grad student career, you start to prepare for various situations.  What could possibly go wrong?  What could derail my carefully thought out plans?  What if the main machine I need breaks?  What if I spill coffee on my laptop?  What are the alternate routes? What if there are complications with my visa and I get stuck in China for 6 months? (That last one happened to another student in my group.)

I spent the early part of this week designing a poster for a conference. I thought I would be on top of things. I was scheduled to leave for the conference tomorrow, so I was planning on printing yesterday afternoon. As luck would have it, it took me MUCH longer than expected to get some other things done. When I returned to my office, the printing guys has gone home.

“No big deal,” I thought. “This is why I planned ahead.” I had built in time for stuff to go wrong, for the printer to break, for all the guys in that office to contract the flu simultaneously.

I dropped off my file this morning at the printer. Not 30 minutes after I did that, I got an email. The conference, you see, is in Austin. There’s a hurricane headed in that direction. The conference organizers decided that having hundreds of people fly into a hurricane wasn’t worth it (I can’t say I blame them). So there’s no conference.

In all of my preparations, I never thought, “But what if there’s a hurricane?” Now I know better.

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A Response To This Entry:

    Hi nicole, you are online ? you never got back ? i hope you are very busy :)

    Posted by: Meyappan Ramasamy on September 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm

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