You know, there is a popular statement in the legal world that states, 'Innocent until proven guilty'.

That's a term known to so many people to the point that it seems to lose the feeling of sophisticated awesomeness that is attached to most legal jargon. However, that statement should never be considered trivial or overlooked in practice whenever someone is suspected of anything.

If you haven't been there, you just wouldn't know that being accused of a certain crime or misconduct can have severe consequences especially when the accused is not guilty of the said offence or misconduct. Maybe this is something we can all relate to if we try to put ourselves in the shoes of the accused.

Think about that for a minute...

I think I've been quite lucky in this angle of life. I haven't been accused of too many things especially in recent years because I've done a really good job of making it obvious at every given time that my 'Yes' is 'Yes' and my 'No' is nothing else but 'No'. That has helped me escape a lot of unnecessary accusations in so many areas of life.

However, I can still recall a series of incidents that occurred during my final year at University that led to me being accused of committing academic theft by my Project Supervisor.

Yeah. I got accused of committing plagiarism and it was left for me to prove beyond reasonable doubt that I'm not guilty.

It would have been so much different if she called me and presented evidence of plagiarism. That wasn't the case. She just looked at my work and before reading any page, she brazenly called it a plagiarised work. Hah! It's funny at the moment, but back then, it was a very big deal because the project had a 4 credit unit load and running into unnecessary drama with my project supervisor wouldn't be good for me.

The reason she gave for assuming that I plagiarised the work is even more interesting.

According to her, she believes there is no way I could have done that much work in less than a week.

Hah! Gotcha!

We had a couple of months to work on the project and I've been doing mine gradually and diligently. But when it was just a week before a meeting with the supervisor, my laptop got stolen in the Church I attend on Campus. That laptop holds all the work I've done on my project at that point and the loss was so devastating on me.

I went the next day to tell the supervisor about the misfortune that befall me with the hope of getting an extended submission time. While I was in her office that day narration how I lost the laptop and all my research work in it, all replies she gave made it obvious that we were on different pages of a hymn book.

Perhaps, she thought I was making up stories about the stolen laptop. All she said is that I have to present my research report on the exact date she originally scheduled for it or I wouldn't like the outcome. I didn't make any further attempts to plead for an extended submission time. I left the office in an even more devasted mind, but I transferred all of that into redoing my research work.

_{The essence of the review that day was for her to go through the first three chapters of the research work which is all about Theoretical Framework before giving us a go-ahead so we can go into the Empirical side of the research report.}

It took days and sleepless nights to redo mine and I was drafting each chapter of the research report with a mobile phone.

Lo and behold, I was able to prepare the first 3 Chapters and came with it on the review day, both the soft copy and the hard copy.

Maybe she was expecting me to turn in a blank report, but when I told her I prepared the first 3 chapters, she immediately accused me of copying stuff online. She wouldn't even look at my work and she refused to go with the flash drive that contains the soft copy of the work.

Back then, I didn't know that I can easily run a plagiarism check on my own. I ended up paying for a plagiarism check to be conducted on the work and it came out clean. I printed out the result, shared that with her and that was it. She finally took the work and gave me the go-ahead.

Up to this very moment, I never got any sort of apology from her for that accusation, but I couldn't care less. I was just happy that I finally got to finish the whole research report without any form of accusation or doubt from her.

Thanks For Not Missing Any Full-stop Or Comma.
_{Thumbnail Image is taken from Pexels
Additional Image is taken from Pexels}