Return To Examinations

Throughout my NS days and the interim periods where I was waiting to be enlisted, and when I was teaching, I did not involve among my activities productive, stimulating neural activity that would produce certain protein links between each brain cell, facilitating the transfer of little electronic impulses whenever I tried to recall something. The little mundane stuff like teaching swimming, screwing some trainees over, Training Safety Regulations, building Tamiya models, or learning how to teach didn't really engage me in a mental capacity that really required me to put some serious thought into it. That said, you could safely state that most of my brain cells went into standby mode.

After three and a half years of not engaging my brain cells to study, I was suddenly required to rouse my braincells from their comatose state and absorb over 200 pages of stuff within 4 days, and it wasn't to say that the content in that bloody textbook was entertaining, to say the least.

Here, lemme give you an example; When you sign up for a Hotmail account, for instance, you encounter this page that has the list of 'Terms and Conditions', and supposedly reading these terms is supposed to be a prerequisite, and you're supposed to browse through and acknowledge that you have read it, and agree to abide by it. Now then, how many of you actually read it?? Let me guess.....none. Why? Because it's so freaking boring, mundane and utterly pointless and irrelevant.

And now that you've got the general idea, picture having to go through in detail 200 pages worth of Hotmail 'Terms and Conditions' so that I can be tested on this subject matter...and you'll realise the enormity of the task my dormant braincells woke up to. And I suppose this shows with the total lack of new blog posts in the past few days, even though I have 5 drafts standing by.

As with all laws and regulations in our country, each clause is fitted with so and 'ands' and 'ors' to cover all possible loopholes, and punctuated with various exceptions, to a point where it becomes an entire paragraph long when a mere 5 word sentence would have sufficed.

Totally. Boring.

Nevertheless, with $105 at stake here, I pressed on and pored over each and every syllable, consonant and vowel. (Man I hate being obligated) I did the mock test, and was pretty encouraged by the initial result of a mere 3 mistakes, which surpassed the passing requirement of 75% by a long shot. But the second mock exam knocked the wind out of me, with a whooping 35 mistakes, which meant I'd failed.

By then I didn't know what to study anymore. Tell me la...how to memorise the different penalties for the offence of 'Tipping Off', 'Non-disclosure of suspicious transactions' and 'Failure to keep proper records'?!? Especially when there are like a hundred times more offences included in the bloody textbook?!

But in spite of it all, I managed to ace the exam. A 2 hour paper I managed to complete and check three times over within half the stipulated time.

And now I got less than a week's worth of time to study for the next paper...*moans...running hands over my face*

For entertainment's sake, here's my Very Own Nation

And the more Dictatorship-like Nation

Go make one for yourself.

Riding hard, fast, safely AND taking a few corners.