Examination Procrastination Part 2: Cigarettes and Gunfights

So I still haven’t really buried my nose in the books. I have, however, spent some time making sure that I’m well prepared to enter the Examination Hall Of DOOOOOOOM. We have to present a bunch of identification documents and such to be admitted, and I’m usually very bad at remembering those things. And if I fail, I want to fail because my work was inadequate, and not because I didn’t even get the chance to be inadequate, damnit.

I was going through the examination guidelines and they were all pretty standard until I got to the rule that says that “Smoking is not allowed in the examination venue”. At first I was like “duh”, but then I kind of went “Bummer”, because if they hadn’t explicitly put that there I might have been able to light up if all those fucking essays started getting to me, and wouldn’t that be awesome? Then I started thinking about why exactly they felt it necessary to include that in the list. Had there been recent incidents of people getting up in the middle of an exam to take a smoke break? But then they were told that they weren’t allowed to leave the room until they were finished writing, and then they went like “Fine, then I’ll smoke in here”, and the supervisors went “You can’t do that”, and then the smoker said “Where does it say that?” and  the supervisors said “Uhm…now that you mention it, nowhere, really” and then the smoker didn’t say anything ‘cause he was too busy lighting up like fifty cigarettes and passing them out.

Then I realized that that was just wishful thinking and I got back to reading the rest of the rules.

And then, casually tacked on at the end, almost as if it were a mere afterthought, they inform us that oh yeah, by the way “Firearms are not allowed inside the examination venue”. And I got to thinking, why the fuck would somebody bring a gun into the exam hall? Were they going to hold the lecturers hostage until they gave them the right answers? Also, note that it’s just firearms that aren’t allowed. Other lethal weapons, however, are apparently fine. So I’ve decided that I’m going to rock up for my Theory of Literature exam with a bow and arrow and at least two swords.

My first exam is on Monday. I’m looking forward to writing in a smoke-filled room where a gunfight could break out at any second. Because this is South Africa, and if the room were quiet and peaceful we’d all probably be like “What the fuck? Where’s the noise and the violence and the pollution? I can’t concentrate under these strange circumstances!”