Exams and Antiques

The slog towards the weekend continues: I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours studying. I hold a Microsoft certification which I am currently updating. This means I have to sit exams which, in turn, means I have to study for exams. No fun.

Well, okay, admittedly it isn’t as bad as it could be. The exams I am sitting are ‘upgrade’ exams so they only cover the material that has changed between the Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 systems. I work with these systems every day, so most of it is second-nature – but there are a few areas where I am as clueless as Joe User would be and getting my head around all the detail involved in those bits is painful.

I had the first exam (there are two) today and I managed a 70% result which was barely a pass! I am expecting tomorrow’s exam to be harder, but strangely I am performing better on the preparation exams than I did for the first one. Go figure.

Hopefully it will all be over by this time tomorrow. Either way (at this time tomorrow) I’ll be sitting in a theatre watching Acorn Antiques – The Musical! Now, for my American readers I should perhaps explain… Acorn Antiques was a series of short sketches on a comedy show fifteen or more years ago which parodied the low production values of a popular soap-opera of the day. It became a bit of a cult hit and, like most ‘Cult Hits’, either you get it or you don’t. (Owen brought the DVD over on Sunday. He loves it, I enjoyed it but Brett slept through most of it – well, we had just had lunch. Even so, he is flying home especially early to see the show with me tomorrow night. What a hero!)

Anyway, they’ve made a musical of it and, to be honest, I’m curious to see what they’ve done. The show is certainly a sell-out hit and the tickets aren’t cheap either (!) so I’m assuming they’ve got some new angle to attract the people who don’t remember the wobbly sets and dreadful continuity of the original soap, around which it is all based, and which have a rather short shelf-life as a joke.

In theory my holiday starts tomorrow. When I walk out of the exam I am not back in work until the Tuesday after Easter. In practice though, I’ve got lots of Chorus stuff to do to get the newbies all sorted before we go away, plus we’ve got to get the spare room ready for Rosie to live in again! (At the moment the wardrobe is full of Christmas decorations that need to find a home until next December.) Hmmm…