I’ve told this story here before but it is a story I love to tell, as you noted on your details, so here it is again, because it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me:
This is it.
I was a senior in college and I went to a school that required a senior thesis. I had been working on it for two semesters, and it was spring semester and the rough draft deadline was coming up. If you didn’t turn your rough draft in by the deadline, even if you finished your thesis on time, you couldn’t graduate. I was really spinning my wheels on it, always working on it, always at my thesis desk in the library, lots and lots of three by five cards… but I was in perpetual research/note taking mode, doing everything but actually writing it, destined not to finish. Then Thursday afternoon, before the Monday rough draft deadline, my best friend showed up at the library with a taxi cab, her posse and a bunch of cardboard boxes and she told me that she was there to get me, that I was going to write my rough draft. She and her “boys” packed up everything from my thesis desk, wrangled it into the taxi and basically kidnapped me. She took me home to my apartment, where we unloaded everything and she proceeded to explain to my roommate that she, my roommate, would be spending the next three days at her boyfriend’s house. Well, that took a little negotiating, because in spite of the fact that she was very fond of her boyfriend, she didn’t really appreciate being summarily thrown out of her own home. After that business was settled, we got to work, and I will tell you, it did not always go smoothly over the next three days. My friend was a harsh task mistress, and I almost locked her out of the apartment a couple of times. But she made it work. I wrote out my thesis rough draft page by page, in long hand and every time I finished a page I would hand it to my friend and she would type it up (on an actual typewriter! It was a while ago). But at the end of the three days, I had my rough draft finished, I was able to turn it in by the deadline and ended up graduating that spring.