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I went to take the GRE today. Long story short, the computer at the testing center broke. I have to reschedule the test. Ugh. Maybe I’ll get to take it next week.

I’m trying to get into a Master’s program for Occupational Therapy. To this end, I’ve been preparing to take the GRE for the last couple months. This is actually my second attempt. I took it in January and did “ok”, and that wasn’t enough to get me accepted into grad school. It was time I did “great”.

I went to bed early, had a normal breakfast (the golden rule I follow is “don’t do anything out of the ordinary”), a good lunch and then was off to the test location. I got there an hour early just in case. 20 minutes before the test was to start, they told me and the others in the waiting room, “there’s a technical problem, there might be a delay.” Ugh, so much for starting my test early.

12:30, my test time, came and went. 12:45… 1pm… 1:10 rolls around and I’m thinking that I will have to reschedule. It’s a long test, last time I was in the test center for 5 hours. After 6+ hours in there, I know I’d be thinking “what’s the square of the hypotenuse of LUNCH?!? What is the definition of LUNCH?!” Just as I was about to bag, they called my name.

I sign in at 1:12pm. I sit down at the computer and begin. Will my energy hold out? Did I take enough caffeine, or maybe too much? All that starts to fade as I sink into the first question. It’s asking me how I feel about politicians with a dark side. I dig in! My mind is in gear, making connections, developing a convincing argument and BAM! “JAVA EXCEPTION” the computer vomits onto the screen. WTF? I turn around in my chair, as if yanked out of The Matrix. A woman sitting opposite me turns away from her desk a moment later looking bewildered. She whispers something that I can’t understand to me and all I can spit out is a grumbling “I don’t know.”

I think back to when I was checking in. The attendant had said something about, “If the screen goes blank, come back here.” Or maybe it had been “When…”. Grrr. I go back to the attendant, I explain how I can’t go on. With a bit of sympathy in her voice she says how the test is run over the internet and there’s no way to fix things at this end. She’s a nice enough lady. She gives me a piece of paper with some numbers scribbled on it and describes how I can reschedule the appointment.

I wandered around downtown San Francisco for an hour, trying to purge my huge buildup of energy.