Did That Really Just Happen?!?!

My appellate brief, which accounts for 75% of my LRW grade was due tonight by 11:00 p.m. This is the paper that I have been working on the entire semester. Countless hours, Westlaw searches, Bluebook Rule checks, conferences with my professor, and a bunch of other stuff I don't care to mention has gone into this paper. Today, I stayed home from church to put the final touches on my paper...not to mention that I literally worked on my paper ALL day Saturday and did nothing else the entire day. I revised my argument sections until lunch and left home to head up to the library where there are fewer distractions. I edited, revised, double-checked, researched, changed, and fixed more things than I ever thought were possible.

10:00 p.m. hit and I realized it was time to stop worrying with the small stuff and get the brief turned in. Then, I realized that I still had not added page numbers to my table of contents and table of authorites. This seriously took every bit of 30 minutes to go page by page and figure out which cases were cited on what page and how many other times they were cited in my argument, but I did it. Then, I went to the printer to look at the hard copy of the fruits of my labor and realized that the page numbers were not there!! So, back to my computer I went where there is a nice little message that says "save could not be completed due to error"...gee, thanks for the explanation there, laptop. I click ok on the message and attempt to save my brief again only to realize that not only did the page numbers not get saved, but they weren't even on there!! By this time, I'm in utter panic mode. I scrambled to try and get some sort of page numbers on this thing to keep myself from losing all of the formatting points allocated to the brief, and at 10:55, I had to stop myself and just turn it in.

Then, true horror set it. My computer would not pull up TWEN (the website where we turn in our written assignments)......AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I seriously bursted out in tears. At this point, I snatched my flash drive out of my laptop and literally ran to the computers in the library and got my brief submitted at 10:59.....yes, 1 minute before the deadline. Not that big of a deal in most situations, right? Just ask for an extension and handle it.....NOT IN LAW SCHOOL!! We have been reminded for months and even throughout last semester that late assignments do not get accepted, and a late assignent would result in a failing grade...which means you fail the class. We work on the brief for several months, so in theory, it should have been done a week ago, not scrambled together one minute before the deadline. Needless to say, had that 1 minute not been there, I would be laying on the floor still balling my eyes out and begging for mercy from my professor.

Now that I've gotten home, settled down somewhat (not really...my heart rate is still sky high), I am attempting to see the big picture. My brief is turned in. While I'm certain it has quite a few formatting mistakes and incorrect page numbers due to my scramble, it's still turned in. With it turned in, there is surely very little chance that I will actually fail the class....hopefully.

Oh well, now it's time to pick up the pieces and focus on oral arguments, which only count for 10% of my grade, but at this point, every little bit counts....and now that it's almost 12:30 at night, I think I'll try to get some sleep.