picking up pieces

Last Friday I came into the office after lunch, very late. The workplace was fearfully silent. Something bad had happened. The few remaining people were stone-faced and quietly typing. When they saw that I had come in, they were very sympathetic, but they treated me like a ghost.

Apparently my kindly, mild-mannered supervisor had been marching around all morning because of me; yelling at people, swearing , hitting things...

The previous night, I ate at a sushi train place. When I got up to leave I noticed that my laptop bag, along with all of my PhD work, had been stolen from under my feet. It didn’t take me long to realise that I had also cleverly put the backup of all of my work in the bag. The next morning, after I was convinced that what had happened actually had happened, I told my supervisor...

It's now sunken in a little more. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem as nightmarish as it all did initially. The paper that I wrote up for my first project had been sent away. None of that was lost. I still have access to all of my raw data. The intermediate analyses of all of my data are gone, but that is just a major hassle more than anything else. Everything is still in my head.

My supervisor offered to pay for half of the new laptop that I am typing on now, which was very nice of him. When I first told him about what had happened, he vowed to "execute without trial" the "sub-human" who had taken my work. He's since calmed back down, though he does seem to have permanently removed the email footer that he once had: ABOLISH CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. Despite myself, I couldn't help but find that just a little bit amusing.

It is nice that he cares so much about me and my work, but I wish the consequences of that weren't so harsh on him and everyone else.