The Spam Filter Ate It

As many will attest, I am a serious procrastinator. I've been saying lately I'm more likely to get a Masters in Procrastination than I'll ever get one in anything else...except I'll work on that later. :) However, when the crunch comes I buckle down and get the stuff done and am usually pleased with the result. The thesis proposal was one such example - many drafts starting in the summer and continuing sporadically through the fall. Promises to myself to have it done before the end of 2005 seemed reasonable, but a nasty flu after Christmas shot that down, followed by another evil bout in mid-January. So I started to aim for the end of January. (Given the thesis is due in May it seemed time to get going on it). The thing I have to keep reminding myself about the thesis is that if I don't get it done - I've only myself to blame and didn't I sign up and pay for this whole experience? So why deny myself the satisfaction of completing it? Anyway, lame or legitimate excuses I may have used over the years are of no use to me now. Surely by the time I'm a Masters student I have learned all the possible lessons of lateness and excuses? I also retain an everpresent hope I will not need any excuses because the universe will unfold as it should. And, as Judith Timson observed in the classic March 1st, 2006 Globe and Mail article "Defined and deranged by how we deal with deadlines",

And, of course, you should definitely not lie or offer lame excuses. The few totally acceptable excuses include a death in the immediate family or the words "I'm in the hospital." I'm not sure your pet's demise counts although in these pet-centred days, it just might. Pathetically lame excuses have been around forever which is why there's a whole series of books entitled The Dog Ate My Homework. There is also a new technological version of the homework-eating dog. It's called The Spam Filter Ate It.

My most recent lesson is: always make a phone call to confirm receipt of an email (plus making the email confirm it for you). My second lesson: there's always another excuse I hadn't yet thought of. Legitimately, and this isn't an excuse but an explanation, I think the spam filter stuff happened to me about a month ago. In all good faith I finished my thesis proposal, emailed it proudly to my advisor DK, and awaited his comments. I think it was a Wednesday or Thursday. By the middle of the following week when I hadn't heard anything, I figured he'd just been busy or out of town, but that I would follow up at the end of the week. As circumstances had it, I went out of town only to leave a phone message for him the following Monday, about 12 days since I'd pressed "send" on my work of academic art. At that point I was hoping he would have extensive comments and edits to improve it even more. To my chagrin, on Tuesday he returned my call to say, "what proposal?"!?!?! WTF?!?!! There the message was in my Sentbox...but not correspondingly in his Inbox. Alas...I think The Spam Filter Ate It. I probably had some (evil) exclamation mark indicating my excitement (academically, not regarding the availability of Viagra, Nigerian trust funds, and the like) in the subject line and the university sent it into the damn spam vacuum (beware the dsv). End of this story is a few days following, my proposal was approved and ethics forms were forwarded to the university ethical powers-that-be. Still waiting to hear on that; better make a phone call.