remembering acts of kindness

Not sure why, but I suddenly remembered something that happened in college, that I really never fully appreciated until now.

I was living in an apartment with five other roommates my sophomore year and I was in an English class. One of the semester assignments was to write an original short novel. I'd been working on it for months. I believe it was at least 20 pages long, and I had been using a roommate's computer to write my paper and it was the evening before it was due to turn it in.

I'd been making final edits, when dinner was ready (I was in a cooking co-op with a bunch of guys in the apartment complex). So I saved my paper, and went to go eat. After dinner, I opened the file on the archaic Windows 3x machine and when it opened it was not my paper! My file name, but the content was not mine.

At that point, I just had a melt down -- completely despondent and non-functioning. Fortunately I still had a print out of the draft from several nights before, but it was no where near the version that it was at when I last clicked save.

My roommmates Dominica and Christie were my lifeboats that evening. At 11 pm at night, they offered to re-type my whole paper based on the print out. I was emotionally and physically exhausted, and they did something so completely selfless that night. Relieved, I think I actually collapsed into slumber, and in the morning, there was my paper. Unrevised, but a tactile document I could hand in.

I'm sure I was eternally grateful for them at the time, but thinking back now, I realize even more how much an act of kindness can really make such an impact.