TMA

TMA – stands for Tutor Marked Assignment. Anyone doing an OU course will know and dread those three little letters, as much as a hen-pecked man dreads the letters PMT or the sole-trader dreads VAT.

In the old days, when the world was black and white, we used to put our printed out TMAs into these things called envelopes and put a little sticky label onto it that proved we’d paid for it’s safe carriage to a designated place (in this case, Milton Keynes). For me, there was usually a flurry of panic as I’d try to print it out at work, lose the pages, find the printer to be out of toner or paper or the pages jam and I just about have an annuerism. Even if it prints out ok, I still worry about getting to the post box before the last post. I made it my business to know which post boxes have a later ‘last collection’ than others (best bet is the one on the corner of Palmeira Square, which is a short cycle ride from home and collects at 7pm).

So when they brought in the e-TMA system, where you can submit your Word document and it gets delivered instantly, I rejoiced. No more printing it out, no more rushing for the last post, no more having to finish it a whole day ahead of the deadline to allow for Royal Mail. Marvellous. This is going to make mylife easier. Truly the Open University are an enlightened organisation.

And now, dear reader I will relate to you the saga of my last TMA, Due midnight, Friday 18th May:

I spent an anxious Friday at work, shuffling paper about knowing I had a much more pressing task to do that I can’t do on work time. I finished late (gah!) and dashed home to boot up the laptop with a view to tidy up my references, write the conclusion, tinker with the latter third of the essay, reread the first half, that sort of thing.

At about 10pm or so I felt I was more or less finished… except oh no! I’d missed a chunk I’d written at work but not emailed to myself. What an idiot! Ok, no biggie, I can rewrite that bit. I have my notes right here.

so I typed away and in some ways improved parts of it, others I remember had been better but that hardly mattered now, as it was nearing 11 and I thought it best to send it. That was when I realised my references were not alphabetical so cut and paste, cut and paste, reformat, count words and it’s ready to send.

I was in the living room, and the laptop (on which I was typing it) had difficulty connecting to the wireless (I of course mean the router, not a 1940s radio). It had been having trouble all evening but I hadn’t been overly concerned, this happens sometimes but sorts itself out after a while and anyway, it gave me a chance to give it another read through, tinker with the introduction,change the font. I still wasn’t keen on the conclusion but by 23.30 it still wasn’t connecting. I decided to do no more to the TMA and this ‘extra time’ was perhaps not so useful after all.

I tried connecting but it still wasn’t playing ball. I tried configuring this and that but still nothing. I tried to connect directly (by cable) but this just brought the laptop to a complete standstill. By this time, Landlord came to see what all the swearing was about. He works in IT so I trust his judgement. He was going on about me not supposed to be putting the cable from the router straight into the laptop (like I’ve done countless times before) and it was about now that I realised he had been on the wine and was VERY pissed. He was slurring and talking slowly and ….. taking reeeeallllly… long… thinking… pauses. He was just too drunk to get any sense of urgency but since he knows what he’s talking about in regards to computers I deferred to him – except I didn’t have TIME for the booze-sozzled words to come burbling out of his mouth, particularly when not all of it was important. It was a this point that I realised I just wanted to kill him because he was talking about ports or something and the computer had crashed. I can hide the body after I’ve sent the assignment, I thought to myself.

I was looking at a blank screen and the drunk man was trying to speak: uh, you…er…. um… well. zhyou don work ‘n IT ssso can’d know that…er….. look [hic] wo’ I’m tryna essplain izh…

I look from him to the screen to my watch – it’s 6 minutes to midnight and I don’t know whether he’s about to provide me with an answer to my problem or give some lengthy IT lecture about ports. The laptop looked very dead. Suddenly the loss of internet connection seemed trivial in light of potentially losing my TMA entirely! He tried again to collect his thoughts but managed only to utter some very long pauses accompanied by a bit of gentle swaying.

I decided I didn’t have time to listen to any of his wisdom so I just went about restarting everything. I switched the router on and off and then tried to bring back the laptop when he suggest we try his work-laptop. YES! You’re a GENIUS! It connected (!) and I logged into the OU website (ooh the excitement!). But, uh, that still left the problem of getting my TMA off one laptop and onto the other. Wait! We have a USB floppy drive! I plugged it in and again the laptop crashed (NOOOO!!!!) and I tried restarting it. This time it wouldn’t log into windows – all I had was a blank screen and vast amounts of cortisol in my bloodstream (3 minutes to midnight). Turning it off and on again, I finally had Windows but before saving it to the floppy, Landlord’s one sober braincell fizzed into life and reminded him that the USB on his laptop had been disabled so it wouldn’t work anyway.

By this time I was beside myself, because I had no internet connection, the laptop that was crashing as soon as you did anything to it, couldn’t connect when it was running and it now had a hard disk that sounded remarkably like a percolator! Landlord has often said that the laptop could die at any time. I berated myself for not having emailed myself a copy of the (at least almost done) TMA the day before so I could retrieve that on the other one! The dying laptop’s drive was making louder noises now but it did connect (1 minute to midnight). The OU website took an age to load but as soon as I clicked any links, it seemed unable to  bring up the next page. I opened a new explorer window as the old one really had hung and finally FINALLY it sent

BUT

I got a note to say the cut-off date had passed and that the tutor is not obliged to mark it. The time stamp received was  00:01, 19 May 2007.

the plan

I seem to have got a bit out of practice with this blogging lark. It’s been a time issue more than anything else. And also, now that Landlord reads my blog (well he doesn’t, but he knows where to find it)I can no longer use this space as the place to say the unsayable, utter the inutterable and blather on about stuff safe in the knowledge that on one but a very forgiving few are going to read it.
But it seems that having told landlord about my blog, he is most keen I keep blogging. For someone who doesn’t read my blog, that sure is a lot of interest.

But aside from that I’m actually here to tell you about a little bit of news. It’s not good news but then it’s not bad news, either. It’s the sort of news where something wrong gets put right but my stomach does alarming little turns at the thought of it and where I actually feel I need someone to hold my hand a little bit. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m pregnant.

I have my appointment with two dental implantologists next month. I’ve seen the scans of my skull, I’ve learned about bone deterioration and seen how much I’ve lost. Been told I’m am about as borderline as they get for needing bone grafts or not. He asked me whether I would prefer bone grafts. Well now let me see… correct me if I’m wrong but don’t you put me under a local anaesthetic, then remove both my lower wisdom teeth so you can harvest bone matter from underneath, to fill out the ridge of bone right behind my top lip, involving a fair amount of ‘discomfort’ for up to a week afterwards and also will move the location of my four front teeth forward slightly.

Trying to get images of Janet Street-Porter out of my mind, I asked whether that would change the appearance of my face and of course I already knew the answer. I also don’t want to have an overbite and a top lip that won’t cover it so the pain, bone harvesting, wisdom teeth extraction and did I mention pain? aside, I’d rather not go through all that, but if not having the bone graft makes the implants hard to place then I’ll just have to bite the bullet as it were and go through with it. He did offer that I could be sedated for the grafting, since it is rather an unpleasant procedure apparently (no kidding?). It might seem a little extreme to be sedated for an anaesthetised dental procedure but I have very vivid memories of the last time I underwent an operation.

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I was fifteen. I had lost one tooth 3 years previously from unwisely breaking my fall with my face in the school playground and again 3 months later while trampolining during P.E.! The gap didn’t bother me too much as I wore an acrylic denture. It was a pink plastic U shape with a tooth attached to the front. Looked rather comical. It fitted fine but sometimes I would unintentionally whistle with the letter S. These things are not conducive to being a happy well-adjusted 15yr old but then at 15 your life is ruined by everything anyway.

The original plan to cap the neighbouring tooth as if it were front tooth and allowing my wisdom teeth (when they come through) to push the teeth and close the gap was abandoned when it was clear I had no wisdom teeth to come through at the top. I had wisdom teeth in my lower jaw but none at the top.

Worse still, the x-rays also showed grey blobs above three other teeth. Seems the impact of the accident had caused cysts to develop at the roots of these three and these would need removing.

So an appointment was booked. I was to have three teeth extracted. An d’you know what? That is really not so bad. I was even struck by how not too bad it was when the dentist got a little curved pick and started to scrape around (loudly!) in the cavity. I noted the small, pink bag of fluid hanging from the dental pick as he put it in the tray, as I got ready for the next unmistakable sound/sensation of having someone scrape metal around in your tooth cavity just below the nose.

After a while, he sewed me up. Stitches reached from one canine to the next and up into the top lip. Quite the beauty queen. Mum went to reception to book my follow up appointment. I stood up out of the dentist chair and my knees wobbled a bit. Shakily I made my way to the receptionists desk when the world suddenly went a bit grey. The room was disappearing and I became acutely aware of my breakfast, which was currently announcing its plans to exit via my mouth. I couldn’t actually see as something had happened to my vision so I said:
“mum, I think I’m going to be sick”

yes, 4 o’clock will be fine, she can…

“mum, I’m going to be sick”

yes, in a minute, I’m just …

“mum, I’m going to throw up RIGHT NOW

at which point the reception dashed out from behind her desk and showed me where the toilets where, instructing me not to lock the door. I lent over the sink and splashed water on my face, crouched against the wall and waited for the room to come back out of the grey haze. It was like the headrush you get from standing up too fast but not nearly as much fun.

That was the last time I was ever ok about going to the dentist. My dentist phobia is not like your dentist phobia.

So my memories of the last major procedure do not exactly fill me with enthusiams for the next. Especially when the procedure sounds even worse. Here is what they do (people of a squeamish disposition with a good imagination, read no further):

They cut open the gum and pack out the area at the front (behind the top lip) with bovine bonemeal. I am assured this ground up cow is a) not the same stuff you put in your garden t help your roses, b) easily accepted into the body and c) won’t give me grass cravings.

Then the drill two holes into the bone at opposite ends of the gap. Here is where I might experience some ‘discomfort’ (read: pain). They will be tapping into the bone and then use a vibrating device to seperate the bone to make the drill hole wider. This is because (due to bone loss) the ridge of bone holding the implant has shrunk to not much wider than the implant itself so they stretch the gap instead. Turns out it’s not just a case of drilling a hole and putting in a rawl plug and screwing some teeth onto it. Oh and the best bit is I’ll be fully conscious the whole time. Isn’t that great?

Hopefully this time I won’t go into shock and throw up all over reception.

Landlord has offered to hold my hand which is sweet but he’d only be sitting in reception worrying and I want to be able to look a little less like the bride of Frankenstein before I see him again.

After the procedure I will be £2500 poorer so if the procedure doesn’t have me pass out, the bill might.

The new teeth don’t get attached for another 4 months so I won’t know whether I’ll be Janet Street-Porter or not until then and frankly that’s the easy part.

And then I’ll have teeth again like you! So remember folks, take care of your teeth. The less a dentist has to do to you the better for everyone (except the dentist). Don’t ever take them for granted. And if you ever fall of a trampoline, try to hit the floor with something other than your front teeth.