Being a graduate student can be isolating at times. People just don't understand. You're not a normal student with a life and hobbies and friends. Normal students gawk at your ability to sit for hours on end reading books the size of the dictionary. They marvel at your ability to live off of energy drinks, coffee, and chips. Privileged undergrads snicker when you discuss your Spring Break plans of heading to the beach with a stack of research, or your exciting Friday nights of grading. Grad students are odd beings with an almost mythical aura surrounding them, like a rarely seen species thought to be endangered, or nerdy academic rock stars. But what people understand least of all are your research needs.
For instance, I remember one afternoon when I went to the library for assistance. I was using an obscure short story for part of my thesis, and because it's obscure, finding an affordable copy of it had been difficult. Of course, one can always borrow such books from the libraries of larger schools, but they really hate when you underline, take notes in the margins, or highlight in their books. Plus, they get testy if you keep a book for too long—something I'll never understand. After all, I'm probably the first person to have touched much less read this book for at least a decade. Why the rush to get it back? It's not like there's a line of people waiting for it. (Exactly how many people are researching male Victorian homosexuality and its relationship to nineteenth-century marriage laws at any given time in the southeast US?) Whatever. Suffice it to say, I wanted my own copy.
I finally tracked down a viable electronic copy of the text using GoogleBooks, but since I can't read without marking up a text—something that is a highly-contagious side effect of grad school (and you should see what it's done to my kiddie lit collection; you've got it bad when you're underlining quotes in Dr. Seuss)—I wanted to print a copy. I hit the library, thinking the fancy thousand-something dollar printer would be lightening fast, or at least faster than my personal Lexmark breadbox 3-in-1.
I was painfully wrong.
When I first planned to print the story, I wasn't aware that it was 90-something pages long, but I had to have this, so I sent the job to the printer. At the printer, I swiped my ID card, selected my job, and hit the print key. The machine did nothing. I waited. Nothing. I hit the print key again, but realized it was frozen. Five seconds later, the printer screen changed, indicating that it was now unfrozen. It groaned, a noise that brought me a sense of relief as it was indicative of life. Sickly life, but life all the same. Like a primeval beast awakening, I waited for the colossus to stir. Finally something in the machine whirred and after much clanking and growling, a whole two pages slid out. Then the machine stopped. Minutes passed, then the machine spit out three pages. It paused, then gave me two more. In three minutes I had five pages—five pages out of ninety.
As I stood there contemplating whether it might be faster to copy the text by hand (with a quill and parchment, or a chisel and slab of granite), a man walked up behind me and smiled. He twirled his ID card in his fingers; he was waiting to print. Crap.
I smiled the guilty way you smile when you know you're about to really, really piss someone off and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. (If you've ever worked retail, you totally know the look I'm talking about.) I turned back to face the printer, hoping it would be struck with a sense of urgency.
For instance, I remember one afternoon when I went to the library for assistance. I was using an obscure short story for part of my thesis, and because it's obscure, finding an affordable copy of it had been difficult. Of course, one can always borrow such books from the libraries of larger schools, but they really hate when you underline, take notes in the margins, or highlight in their books. Plus, they get testy if you keep a book for too long—something I'll never understand. After all, I'm probably the first person to have touched much less read this book for at least a decade. Why the rush to get it back? It's not like there's a line of people waiting for it. (Exactly how many people are researching male Victorian homosexuality and its relationship to nineteenth-century marriage laws at any given time in the southeast US?) Whatever. Suffice it to say, I wanted my own copy.
I finally tracked down a viable electronic copy of the text using GoogleBooks, but since I can't read without marking up a text—something that is a highly-contagious side effect of grad school (and you should see what it's done to my kiddie lit collection; you've got it bad when you're underlining quotes in Dr. Seuss)—I wanted to print a copy. I hit the library, thinking the fancy thousand-something dollar printer would be lightening fast, or at least faster than my personal Lexmark breadbox 3-in-1.
I was painfully wrong.
When I first planned to print the story, I wasn't aware that it was 90-something pages long, but I had to have this, so I sent the job to the printer. At the printer, I swiped my ID card, selected my job, and hit the print key. The machine did nothing. I waited. Nothing. I hit the print key again, but realized it was frozen. Five seconds later, the printer screen changed, indicating that it was now unfrozen. It groaned, a noise that brought me a sense of relief as it was indicative of life. Sickly life, but life all the same. Like a primeval beast awakening, I waited for the colossus to stir. Finally something in the machine whirred and after much clanking and growling, a whole two pages slid out. Then the machine stopped. Minutes passed, then the machine spit out three pages. It paused, then gave me two more. In three minutes I had five pages—five pages out of ninety.
As I stood there contemplating whether it might be faster to copy the text by hand (with a quill and parchment, or a chisel and slab of granite), a man walked up behind me and smiled. He twirled his ID card in his fingers; he was waiting to print. Crap.
I smiled the guilty way you smile when you know you're about to really, really piss someone off and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. (If you've ever worked retail, you totally know the look I'm talking about.) I turned back to face the printer, hoping it would be struck with a sense of urgency.
The man behind me crossed his hands and rocked back and forth on his feet for a few minutes. He gave me a quizzical smile. How much longer? his eyes asked. I glanced down at the growing pile of paper, then back at him apologetically. My eyes answered, A really, really, really long time.
He sighed heavily, impatience growing. I began feeling guilty as a line began to grow. I reached out and gave the decrepit printer an encouraging pat, hoping that no one in the line would notice.
Then it dawned on me how ridiculous this was. Here I felt like a horrible, selfish person for printing something I needed, yet there were three other printers completely free! Why was it that everyone must necessarily use the same printer as the over-loaded graduate student? How was that fair? Who made the genius decision for the whiney undergrads with their “too-long” six-page articles to get behind and harass the overworked grad student?!
Finally, the man behind me stormed off in a huff. And as he turned the corner out of sight, the printer made a final groan and spit out my last two pages. Thank you, karma.
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