Psychology major Claude Abdoulaye Pedila downloaded an antivirus program in order to meet Eastern’s internet standards, but the application fired back, triggering a fatal assault on her computer.

She then installed a second antivirus program to contest the first.

The two antivirus programs engaged in combat, neither providing a solution to an already escalating dilemma nor returning the computer to its previous condition.

Abdoulaye Pedila yearned for a ceasefire.

She sought out the tech zone at the Eastern bookstore, a measure she took as a last chance effort to get her documents back.

But the $50 she spent failed to restore her computer.

“It was a waste of money because I did not get my stuff back,” Abdoulaye Pedila said.

Each semester, students pour every computer crash, deleted document and missing assignment into maintaining a healthy grade point average.

Through every sleep-deprived night, they must keep a bloodshot eye or two on all that could possibly go wrong with their assignments.

It is then up to the student, however hard it might be, to mend these problems before the deadline, whether the issue was engendered by computer failure or human error.

Robbie Gladu, who has had his own mishaps as a 3-D studio art major, struggled to fathom how his sculpture project in Ceramics III fell apart, not only once, but twice.

In preparation for what had been a rather crucial assignment, Gladu pressed and rolled chunks of clay into coils on a table, which began to take the shape of snakelike creatures, out in front of him during a class last spring.

He grinded through the entire class period, or about 2 1/2 hours, on what he anticipated would look like a sculpture.

It extended upwards of two feet tall by the time the course session was over, and, after Gladu stayed back in the classroom to work on it some more, it reached three feet in height.

His teacher was flooded with excitement.

After all, it was to be the largest sculpture assembled in that studio in quite a while.

But when darkness blanketed the room, the tower crumbled on its side.

“I do not know if I was really bad when I first started, or if someone was knocking my sculptures over,” Gladu said, hoping it was the former rather than the latter.

Frustrated, but unwilling to cease his efforts, he came back to his workshop once more.

He built another sculpture, this one slightly taller than the first.

That one plummeted to the earth much like its predecessor.

On his third attempt, Gladu accomplished what he had set out to achieve all along: he built a sculpture, completing it the following fall.

“You just need to have patience and not try and work too fast,” Gladu said. “But, also, maybe put signs around your artwork so people don’t mess with it or bump into it.”

Jihed Ncib, a graduate student majoring in political science, tackled a similar debacle when he was a corporate law student in France.

He penned an analysis on monumental court decisions for one of his courses, an exam that endured for five hours.

Students could not collect credit on the test unless the professor carved his signature on an exam form.

Ncib turned in the exam forms to his professor once he finished, unaware of this consequential course requirement.

“I went home and probably a few days later I realized, ‘oh no,’” Ncib said.

His teacher, who did not know his name in a class size of 300 students, marked Ncib with a zero on the examination.

It was not, to his benefit, a particularly important test, enabling him to make it up with other exams.

Asked how he approached such predicaments as a law student going forward, Ncib replied with a terse explanation.

“I left law school,” Ncib said with a laugh. “I did get my degree, but I did not finish law. Now I am a political science major.”

Tom O’Connor can be reached at 581-2812 or troconnor@eiu.edu.