At myself, that is.

I spent all day yesterday with my nose buried in books, calendars, and the laptop, working like a little trooper on developing three syllabi for most of the new classes I’ll be teaching this fall.

Now, when I put together a syllabus, it goes well beyond “this is the book you need” and “here’s my attendance policy” and “turn off your cell phone, and don’t even think about checking your email while in class.” No, I actually break down, day by day for 16 weeks, what the reading assignments are, due dates for papers and exams, even guest speakers if I’m hosting any. That way, I’m able to space out the assignments so I don’t get slammed with papers from multiple groups to grade all over the same weekend, and they don’t have more than one assignment to turn in to me at any one time. If the students have a lot of reading, I back off on the writing, and vice versa. So you can understand why this was an all-day project, and why I still wasn’t quite done.

So there I was, sitting on the sofa, when I thought of something else to add. (It was the no cell phones or email part.) I grabbed the laptop, opened My Documents — and discovered that one syllabus of the three I had just slaved over all day was missing.

Gone. For good. I ran the search function I don’t know how many different times. I intentionally misspelled words. I searched by title, by words in the text, by date last modified, and by any other way I could think of. And because I’ve never taught Editorial Writing before, I was working up the missing document from scratch, not revising and recycling.

The good news, I guess, is that I remember most of what was on the now-MIA document, but the bad news is that what I DON’T remember is all that stuff about assignments and due dates. I KNOW I saved the *$(&#% thing; I’m always very careful about that, and Microsoft Word always prompts me if I try to close without saving first, anyway. So I’m off now to eat something very fatty and salty, or maybe do some electronics retail therapy, and then I’ll start over. Sigh.