Raven emailed me a link to this story in the Onion: Heroic Computer Dies to Save World From Master's Thesis:

"This fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of exasperated head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who had already read through three drafts of Samoskevich's sprawling, 38,000-word dissertation, titled A Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. "It was an incredible act of bravery. This laptop sacrificed itself in order to put an end to Jill's senseless rambling."

Nothing like my own Master's Thesis, 3-D Text Objects in the Brown Animation Graphics System, which clocked in at just 8 pages. Mind you, it was backed up by tens of thousands of lines of C code.