Today in the life of a Medill sophomore…

8:00: Your wake up to the sounds of your cell phone’s alarm. You groggily hit snooze, pull the blankets over and go back to sleep.

8:08: Your alarm goes off again. Snooze. You have a nice dream about bagels.

8:16: Your alarm goes off again. You’re about to snooze one last time when you hear Medill people screaming in the halls. You decide to wake up and crawl to your laptop. You wonder where your other sock went.

8:18: Check Facebook.

8:20: They broke up?? WTF. You post a wall note with a sad face emoticon.

8:25: You start refreshing your e-mail. As you click mindlessly, you feel like something’s wrong with this situation, but you’re not sure what. Maybe you need a bagel.

8:29:50: Boom. Keri Disch shows up in your inbox. You open the e-mail and scan desperately. You find the link and click. You’re greeted by another link, which you click. Then another one. You click them all. At the end it’s… a PDF!? You stare, weeping inside, as the PDF takes forever to load. Damn you, Adobe Acrobat.

8:33: You try to remember at what point Medill said the form would be a downloadable PDF.

8:34: The PDF finally shows up. Success! Oh wait, you: have a Mac, don’t have Acrobat, Acrobat’s messed up, your Internet is screwing up, and/or the PDF isn’t working. You try to find another computer. Everyone awake is filling out their own form, and everyone else is asleep.

8:37: You finally have the form working. As you type your name, your cell, and your e-mail, you mentally calculate that your chances of going on spring TM is rapidly dwindling. Well, winter of junior year wouldn’t be too bad… second!

8:38: You re-read the submission instructions. You click the time stamp, proud of yourself. Only later do you realize you can edit the timestamp by typing something different in the box. Oh well. Save. Send. Scary dialog that you don’t want to deal with pops up. Something about data. You keep clicking OK and hope it works. You’re not sure what’s going on. You read the instructions again. Finally, you just log in to WebMail, attach the file and send the damn thing.

8:39: You get the confirmation e-mail. You send out various IMs cursing Medill for putting you through that.

8:42: Check Facebook. Aww, cute picture of you. You make it your profile pic.

8:51: Medill sends an e-mail saying the form has problems on Macs. For some reason you laugh, in a sick, sick way. Then you start crying.

9:01: As you eat your bagel and collect your thoughts, you realize you don’t actually know what just happened.