Oh my...

You know what's embarrassing? When your advisor emails you a week after you have surgery and says "I'm trying to find those files, the stimuli from 5 years ago...When you get a chance," and you don't get in for 1 and 1/2 weeks later and it turns out she still hasn't been able to find them anywhere. You talk, catch up, do all the coordinating that needs doing, and she leaves.

One cigarette break later, you get to work looking everywhere. You look on all four work station computers, on every cd you can get your hands on - even the ones which are labeled for something else. You coax the various computers to open the various zips and you find nothing.

You look in all the drawers and cabinets to see if you missed a cd or a zip but you just can't find them. After about 40 minutes has passed in frantic, fruitless searching, when you're sitting there pondering a pile of floppies and Jaz disks you found in a dusty cardboard box on the floor, you know you're in trouble.

Then a thought strikes you. You enter your advisor's office. You turn on her computer, feeling a little guilty for going on there when she's gone and feeling quite furtive about logging onto her personal computer. You tell yourself she wants the files and you don't want to come back empty handed without having turned every damned stone and you just seriously don't want to bust out the floppies. You search for probable names of the folder the files would be in, starting with the most obvious.

And you find it, on the first search. The folder, the files, the meticulous notes you made on the creation of the files, detailed documentation of "to do" and "done" tasks relative to the files when they were last your responsibility. You find all of it just how you left it five years ago - wrapped up nice and neat.

Now that is embarrassing.

Not for me. For me it was kind of validating. And I can honestly say, after being made to feel like a useless husk of a PhD student for the last two years by my department head, it felt kind of good to call my advisor from her office and leave this "You'll never guess where I found those files..." message on her answering machine.