Goodbye Thesis!

Today was the day: the final day my master’s dissertation (as they say in the UK, as opposed to thesis) is in my hands. All I had to do was print it off. Sounds simple, right?

You’d be wrong.

A4 paper. This is what divides the world, that and the metric system. The rest of the world uses A4 (which is approximately 8.3” X 11.7” and makes way more sense in millimeters), while the US either uses Letter (8.5” X 11) or legal sized (no clue, but its long). You say “A4” and people know what you’re talking about, so it’s not like I’m crazy. They just that stern, sad look and say without hesitation, “No, we don’t have that.” Nobody had it. A4 paper does not exist in Montana, it’s a myth, a legend, the Shankara stones in my very own Indiana Jones episode. Yes, there was running and jumping and whip cracking. There were crazed natives and incarnations of Shiva, and it wasn’t until I had hit rock bottom that anybody (a nice little man with a pocket protector at Office Depot) even SUGGESTED that I could just have legal sized paper cut down to an appropriate size. Props to him for actually being HELPFUL.

The first quite was devastating: Kinko’s could cut down paper for nothing less than $1.40 a page. I needed at least 218 pages, so that was a deal-breaker. But the locals, Insty-Prints (they do the fliers for the Yellowstone Music Festival) said, “Sure, it’ll cost you…. $3 to do an entire reem, plus the cost of the reem. Whew. Whatever crap Kinko’s was doing to actually think that $1.40 per page was just, they should really take a few steps, 12 to be exact.

But it turns out that Insty-Prints binding machine was broken. So after the cutting and printing ordeal, we pack up and hustle over to Staples, where the lady behind the counter bemusedly assured me that yes, she would bind A4 paper and no, I wasn’t the only crazy person who asked for A4 printing. How sweet of her.

It was actually way more stressful and exciting than that, but after telling the story several times, it kinds of loses steam in a blog.

But it is all done and off. After months of being ready to be finished with this whole school thing, I finally am!