Frazzled.

I'm frazzled today. I needed to get my exam written so it could be printed up in time for the scheduled hour today, 1:30. I had gotten almost no sleep on Saturday night and spent Sunday morning proctoring my Religion and the Constitution exam, and I did not think it wise to work on the Civil Procedure exam while proctoring. At noon, there was a CivPro Q&A session. I spent the afternoon and evening writing the CivPro exam, up to the point where it just needed some polishing, proofreading, and formatting--maybe an hour's work--and it seemed best to leave it until morning.

As I was getting ready for work, I thought about how awful it would be if my computer behaved badly. I emailed my draft to myself from home and drove to work. I opened my email attachment, worked on the draft for an hour, saving very frequently, and then Microsoft Word quit on me. Opening the draft again, I saw it had gone back to the email attachment form, refrained from wasting any time freaking out, and redid the previous hour's work, again saving frequently. Microsoft Word crashed again! To my horror, it had again reverted back to the email attachment form. I had lost all the work again! What a nightmare!

Well, I did keep my wits about me and get it done, and the students are taking it now. No one has come up to point out some oversight. I hope all is well. The students are taking the exam in two different rooms, so I did not want to proctor. It doesn't seem right to me for one group to have the teacher there and the other group not to. Whether it's good or bad to have the teacher in the room is debatable. It could be convenient if you have a question, but it could be annoying. In any case, it's different, and it's better for the conditions to be the same.

Nevertheless, I am here in the building, and if there were a problem I would hear about it. So round about now I should be getting unfrazzled. But I'm still waiting for the defrazzlement to set in.

UPDATE: Several people have suggested that I handle the email attachments differently when I open them up in Word and edit them. I'm going to take additional steps next time, but I've got to say, I bought Microsoft Office (OS X for the Mac), and I use their email program, Entourage. If Word and Entourage can't play nice together, what the hell is the point of Office?