Math during EE

Hope can come in the strangest form and in the least expected manner.

Today I made a grave error in my math paper. It was a most ridiculous, more stupid error that I have ever made; and it is not a careless mistake.

I daresay that no one else, given my situation, would have done the same thing I did – which was, basically, nothing at all.

Here is the story: my calculator stopped working.

And I did not put my hand up for a spare.

I ended up doing the calculator-assumed manually, relying solely on my trusty Casio instead of the big bulky evil bully that is my TI-89 graphic calculator which at just the moment of my mathematics exam, decided to stop differentiating by resetting itself. It totally did not help that the entire paper was on differentiation.

So I had to skip the more complicated parts. In my defence, I did look in front whether there were calculators available to ask for but my eyes must have hit a blind spot because I completely missed the stack of TI-89s sitting nicely at one corner. I cannot even explain why I didn’t just take a risk and ask. I cannot explain at all. It still baffles me, this mystery.

Right after my paper, I went straight to Miss Santhi, told her of my predicament and asked her to teach me to reset the settings. My teacher looked at me, almost bewilderedly, saying, “Why didn’t you put up your hand?” as she set the extra calculators down on the table.

I think my heart died a little then, seeing the pile of working, functioning TI-89s. I could only muster a small, “Teacheerrr...................!”

Words cannot describe the amount of regret I felt at that moment and the many moments after that until 11.00 p.m. As my unit descended into quietness for the first time, my phone rang.

Me: Who’s this?

Phone: You guess.

Me: Errrr... errrr.... Es..me?

Phone: No. *line rattles because Digi does not have wide coverage* Miss Santhi.

Me: Ha? Who?

Phone: Ha! Name also you forget!

Lol. I honestly thought she was calling to give me bad news about my paper. Apparently she only called to tell me not to worry. After that 7 minutes phone call, I literally skipped into my room and retold the story to my sampat roommate. And save to say, the world felt right again.