The Deadline

This was a narrative essay done for my English 111 class in college. It was originally done in MLA format, but since this is a blog, I have removed that formatting.

You can view college shenanigans that aren’t blog worthy here. As I post things they will update and the newest will be at the top. The link should always work.

The deadline almost got me. I had close calls many times before, but this one was too close. If someone ever has a task to do and is thinking about procrastinating, do not.

It was a normal day of school. I had just finished the last of my homework and was packing up to leave. As I was walking out of the school’s storied halls, I suddenly realized I had forgotten something. A few weeks prior my teacher had assigned a paper that was due that night. It did not seem too difficult when it was assigned so I just put off doing it. That turned out to be a painful mistake.

I had written many thousands of words in too little time before, but this assignment was different. Rather than being the usual assignment where we just had to write a fictional story, we were assigned a two thousand word research paper. The assignment would not have been difficult if I had started on time, but I had not which certainly did not help the situation. Maybe I should write my paper about procrastination next time.

The whole reason this assignment was late was because of the prompt. All we were told was to write a two thousand word paper about a topic we enjoyed. Like usual there were so many things I wanted to write about, so I had jotted down a few ideas. I found the paper’s guidelines and started running through how I would write these reports in my head. I loved each topic, but they all would have been really hard to develop and reach the word count with.

This brainstorming took longer than I expected, and I ended up spending an hour trying to figure out a topic. I finally decided to write about the benefits of spending time outdoors. A rather ironic choice, since this paper kept me indoors for longer than it should have.

I immediately ran up to my room, opened my computer, and started typing. I was typing furiously when I realized that my computer had died, and I was typing on a blank screen. Like the rest of the ordeal, this did not turn out well either. I had gone to my friend’s house the day before and left my charger there. I called my friend in a frenzy and asked him to bring it to my house. In the meantime I started writing the essay by hand. I had done this in school before, but never with this close of a deadline, or with this many words.

While I was writing furiously, my friend was stuck in traffic with the charger. Although it felt like hours, he arrived after fifteen minutes, and I plugged my computer in. I assumed it would be smooth sailing from then on, but I was wrong. I had already decided what I was going to write my report on, but it turned out to be one of those topics where good sources are few and far between. I had done many searches and found only forum posts from twenty years ago about spending time outdoors, something we do not do much anymore. I managed to find a few good sources from the Mayo Clinic which allowed me to get a good start on my paper.

Since my friend was not a procrastinator, and he had finished his essay a few weeks earlier, he decided to make himself at home and make some tea. He made it, gave me some, and sat down beside me. Although I was typing as fast as I could, he told me about a similar experience he had a few years prior with a science fair project. He had to do the egg drop challenge, except in his case it turned out to be an egg smash challenge. Although it was a slightly different scenario, this magnified the cause of my current distress. Although someone may think they have time and want to put it off until later, it is better to get a head start on the project and not procrastinate. Whether it is a two-thousand word research paper or a science fair project, procrastination never turns out well.

As he finished telling his story, I was finishing my report. Although I had faced many problems throughout the project, it was finally complete. The next day at school, I handed in my paper. After class had started, the teacher had asked how we got along with the paper. Most of my classmates had started early and had found the project fairly simple. I raised my hand and asked the teacher if I could say something. She told me I could, so I stood and said, “I can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t procrastinate!” Everyone had already heard my story and had a good chuckle at my statement.

Although painful, this harrowing experience taught me an important lesson that can be applied to many situations in life. If someone ever has a task to do and wants to procrastinate, do not. It may seem like a good idea, or even be reasonable at the time, but one never knows what will happen later, like forgetting a charger or even the assignment that may jeopardize the ability to do that assignment.