IT CAME FROM ALLEN'S BRAIN!

When I went to Lincoln to check into their DMin program, I had some time to kill before the meeting, so I wandered around campus for awhile. I headed over to the library to check out the theses of some of the folks I had gone to school with. Of course, being the self-centered person that I am, I located my thesis first. Upon opening it, I found a little lavender post-it note on the inside front cover that read "Page 53 is missing." Not one to take a post-it note at its word, I flipped through, and--sure enough--page 53 was missing!
When I got home that day, I checked my personal bound copy of my thesis. To my chagrin, it, too, was missing page 53! I rifled through my box of floppy disks until I came to the one that said "Thesis" on it. I stuck it in the drive, only to discover I had inadvertently copied over it!
I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding the mysterious page 53 to complete my thesis copy. My suspicion was that when I brought my thesis into the copy place to, well, be copied, page 53 had stuck to the back of 52 and never got duplicated--and thus never collated into the copies.
Yesterday, however, while looking for something else entirely, (which I utterly failed to find, by the way) I happened across a worn-out Manila envelope stuffed to capacity. Yep, it was a copy of my thesis! AND it had page 53! Now, all I had to do was go to the local library, make a couple copies, and get them reinserted (paperclipped, probably) into the various incomplete volumes! And there was great rejoicing, for the lost had been found--and they killed the fatted chicken (this is a budget production for sure!) and began to celebrate!
BUT the story does not end there! (No, the other faithful pages don't go off in a huff, or even a minute-and-a-huff, about the celebration. That would make an interesting story, though.)
I have a couple other bound copies of my thesis floating around. (They have to pile heavier tomes on top of them to prevent them taking out a window or something. My initial suggestion was that we just tie them down somewhere, but the librarians kept insisting that they couldn't bind that which was already bound. I'm looking into the plausibility of it, anyway. I'm conducting a double-bind study! [rimshot]) So, I called the Ozark Christian College library to have them check on pg 53, and then offer a copy of that missing page. The director of the library called me back later that day to inform me that their copy of my thesis is NOT missing page 53!
This makes me wonder about the additional back-up copy of my thesis that LCCS keeps in a vault or something. (They keep two copies of every Masters thesis for some reason.) I wonder if it has pg 53!
I'm still waiting to hear from my folks, who have the final extant copy of the paper.

Listening to: "The Okeh Ellington," Duke Ellington