Wednesday

Last night was highly amusing. I got home after a fairly smooth commute for about 6-30pm (pretty good), to be welcomed by C who had concocted a delicious home-made chicken & asparagus pie. Food was eaten, conversation held, and then we watched episode 2 of the current season of Deadliest Catch (the crabbing season is something of an annual tradition in our household). Generally, it was a most enjoyable evening.

 

At about 10pm, as C was winding down to go to bed we did our usual evening routine – I sang to fiver and then headed upstairs to study some German, whilst she showered and sorted in preparation of going to sleep. Upstairs, I decided, in a fit of organisation, to work out exactly what the intermediary test was all about, so I followed the instructions on the page.

 

One of the buttons, at the bottom of the information page was marked ‘Click to proceed’. So I clicked it, expecting a second page of instructions.

 

It launched the test.

 

I promptly went into a fully-fledged panic; the test was timed, couldn’t be interrupted, and each module – when you left it – couldn’t be re-entered. For me, as I was caught completely on the hop, this was bad news – not only was it 10pm and I’d done no revision - I hadn’t even set my keyboard to ‘German format’ (or in other words, umlauts were absent).

 

Under these circumstances, I think that I did fairly well: out of the 70% of the exam attempted, I scored 63%. This was sadly still a fail (70% needed to pass), and there were 3 modules where I got zero – either because I ran out of time (I had to spend spent several minutes getting my computer ready for the test, resetting the keyboard etc), or because – when I left modules to prepare my computer – the test deemed that I had activated, and then departed from, a test module.

 

So yes, highly amusing.

 

Tonight, (depennding on what my tutor says), I intend to redo the test, this time under (hopefully) better conditions. One possibly featuring umlauts. I may even get this done in time for Jons game, which now isn’t running, due to an organisational hiatus, as, in Cambridge, calendars are looked upon with wonder and suspicion.

 

S