You Can't Plan for Everything

If you read this blog even semi-regularly, you probably know I plan and organize everything. When it came to taking the California bar exam, my boyfriend-study partner and I left nothing to chance. We arrived in San Mateo, the site where we took the exam, nearly 24 hours before the exam began. We checked out the exam location, making sure we knew where the entrance, bathrooms and drinking fountains were. We located a nearby fast food restaurant, plotted the path there, and made contingency plans if the parking lot was full. We walked from the hotel to the exam site, timing it, in case the car had a flat tire or didn't start the morning of the exam and we needed to walk. We brought food to eat for breakfast in the room so we didn't end up in a long line at a restaurant or the room service queue.

As the 16 weeks from the time of the exam to the time the results were posted last night, we have mostly tried to not think about it. You can't do anything at that point anyway, so what is the use? Over the last month however, it had been getting harder and harder to ignore. A single line of text on a web site could change our lives. How can you not start thinking about it?

Anticipating having a hard time sleeping the night before the results came out (Thursday night), we each took a sleeping pill.

On Friday, I had the results page of the State Bar's web site up all day. I watched the hourly countdown on there until it became a minute by minute countdown at about 90 minutes to go. I thought surely the results would get posted a little early, to help ease some of the congestion to the site right at 6. Nope.

I did get right through at 6pm, putting in my application and file numbers. However, the screen I was taken to only had those 2 numbers, my name (my previous name, for anyone checking the list tomorrow, since that is the name I originally registered at the State Bar with way back when), and the sentence, "The name above appears on the pass list for the July 2008 California Bar Examination."

I had to read it a couple of times. Huh? What? No easy "pass" or "fail". Um, does this mean I really passed??? I printed out the page, just for good measure. I then began down my list of phone calls to make. My boyfriend was at the top of the list, but he had not been able to get through on the bar's web site yet, so while I could tell him that I passed, he did not know his results yet. I then called my children, parents, siblings, and friends.

Once he came over, we celebrated with a bottle of champagne. We had not planned to go anywhere, because we were not sure what the results would be, nor how long it would take us to get them, and then notify everyone. That ended up being a good decision. (We do have reservations for a nice dinner out tonight, which I am sure we will enjoy much more than we would have if we had gone out last night.)

After falling asleep before 10, we both woke up at 1am. Not the kind of awake where you open your eyes and roll over and fall back asleep. We were wide awake. After watching some tv and eating leftover enchiladas, we eventually went back to sleep around 4:30 or so. Ugh. If we had truly planned ahead, we would have taken sleeping pills last night too!

This post is long enough, so I will wait until next week to give my thoughts on the whole process.