This reminds me of a story someone I worked with once told me. Sometime around 1989, he was writing his dissertation (or was it a master's thesis? memory dims, so call it a dissertation). On a typewriter. For some reason I don't recall, it really had to be in on the first of May, else he would have to wait until fall to submit it. And so in early April he went to rural Pennsylvania to hole up at a relative's cabin and finish the damn thing.
On the morning of May 1st, newly typed dissertation in hand, he got into his 1980 Honda Civic and began driving back to Philadelphia. It was a beautiful day, and he rolled down the windows (the Civic, natch, had no air conditioning), revelling in the beautiful spring air, singing along to the radio, when suddenly he noticed a jarring percussive beat undercutting the song's bass line. He looked over to see what it was, and found, to his horror, that it was the pages of his dissertation being whisked, one by one, out of the open window by the wind. He pulled the car to a screeching halt, but about half of his opus was gone. He pulled into the nearest motel, rented a room, plugged in his typewriter, and started trying to recreate the thing from his rough draft. Of course, the pages didn't come out evenly, so he had to do it again. Twice. By the time he got to Philadelphia, whoever he was trying to give the thing to had fled. That's why he was spending his summer working for a Ralph Nader group instead of doing something useful. Or so he said.
This holiday season, be thankful you're not him. And how about backing up your hard drive while you watch the I Love Lucy marathon?
When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis I had it backed up on two different servers on two different continents. If somehow they were both destroyed at the same time I suppose losing my thesis would be the least of my problems...
too bad that was in a day before carbon paper...
He's just lucky he wasn't kidnapped by a psychotic Kathy Bates. It might have hobbled his summer of PIRGing.
There are too many versions of this "urban myth" floating around for it to be taken seriously.
For one thing back in those days virtually everyone hired a professional typist to do the final version.
Every department had a list of experienced people they recommended who were familiar with all the rules for footnoting and all the other details that were required for the final version.
So now instead of missing deadlines because they need to retype their dissertation, students miss their deadlines because they played World of Warcraft for 62 straight hours.
"Natch" needs to die.
a father of an old friend of mine gave up on his PhD when he dropped his dissertation near an oncoming T train. And although this may be a common urban myth it has to have actually occurred to someone. Kind of like the guy who dropped his iPhone in the toilet story. Not that its happened to me or anything. But keeping electronic backups is so simple these days I'm always surprised that fewer people do it.
If a story appears in many different forms, it is either an urban legend, or it actually happens a fair bit.
The lost manuscript has been well recorded a couple of times, noteably the original version of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence [of Arabia].
Example 2 is the original Book of Mormon.