TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Metalworking FLUID Certificate Course

Day Three
By

John Fischer

November 2007:

Day Three:  Testing - Testing - Day 1-2-3

Dreaded day three.  Alarms are ringing.  I didn’t oversleep.   So far, so good.  What I didn’t know was that my luck for the day ended right then and there.  I was going to meet my study partner and try to breeze through the materials for a quick review. It would be better than nothing.  Best yet, I was finally going to get to eat a real breakfast at Denny’s.  As I stepped out of the elevator he was there waiting for me.  “Where the hell have you been?”  It was the first of several trick questions I would have to answer today.  I needed to be careful.  There was more than one right answer, so I needed to give the best answer.   I had been here at the hotel.  That answer seemed right, but it was too obvious.  There must be a better answer.  In my room?  In my bed?  Maybe something more present tense.  In the elevator? 

Time ran out before I could answer.  Crap.  “We have to be there at 8 AM, they’re starting early today.  We will have to eat here.”  Crap crap crap.  No Denny’s again.  I forgot that, in what was clearly a set-up, one of the instructors had asked at the end of the day yesterday if anybody wanted to start early.  In a millisecond, the girl from SAE shouted “Yes!”  That was followed a millisecond later by “OK then, everybody be here at eight.”  The quick-gavel was dropped on us before our overloaded brains could form the obvious objection that we needed the thirty extra minutes to review the 1,000 slides before the exam.  The problem now though, was breakfast.  For all the things the hotel did well, this was not one of them.  Today’s dawn delight was mini-pizza with egg on top.  Barf.

Rush to classroom.  One more module on waste treatment.  Then it was time for the scheduled question–answer period.  I offered a belated protest to the early start and was quickly overruled.  As I expected, and as they must have known, there were very few questions.  Three I think, counting my request for a thirty-minute study reprieve.  With no time to review, we didn't know enough to have any questions.

Here comes the test.  Closed book.  Scantron.  This test was strange.  It was a mix of the very easy and the very hard.  The chemical and biological names had been killing me for three days, and this  was the "coup de grâce."  If I died on this test, it was somewhere between the polyalphamoly-something and the aspergraspus testus failus.  Actually, I blew a couple of easy ones along the way for good measure.  The last test I failed was a German spelling quiz in 7th grade.  I didn’t have time to study for that one either.  We won't get the results from this one for a couple of weeks.  Its going to be close, I can tell you that.

By the time I reached the airport, I was in stage three melancholy.  Too tired to care, I just wanted to go home, and sleep. 

Next week – I will provide a fully rested retrospect of the entire course.