According to Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and nowhere is this more evident than in the mind-bending, hellish nightmare of stress that is exam day. Let us examine a typical instance of said nightmare under Murphy’s Law:
You will wake up late. Let’s not even kid around about this one. You’ll discover, in a spectacularly groggy daze, that a) you set your alarm for PM instead of AM, and b) this is very bad, and c) you just lost a solid 45 minutes of prep time, and d) what the hell are you still doing in bed? All of these realizations will collide in your brain at exactly the same moment, so you’ll nearly strangle yourself with your sheets trying to leap out of bed, and the layout of your own room will be completely unfamiliar, and you’ll blunder around for a bit in an adrenaline-addled craze of terror. Also, you’ll probably fall flat on your face at one point, so prepare for that, maybe by wearing a helmet at all times.
You will have nothing to wear. Forget cute clothes, or even borderline acceptable clothes; everything in your closet will suddenly morph into the seasonally inappropriate concoctions of a social suicide mission.
You’ll forget something. You’ll be halfway to class when you realize you forgot something vitally important, like your calculator, or your right hand. It’s at this point that you will have a difficult decision to make: go back and risk being late, or trek onward and try to do without.
You’ll be late. It doesn’t matter if you went back or continued to trek; you will be late, and the sooner you accept your role as the obligatory disheveled mess who bursts through the doorway ten minutes after the bell, the better off you’ll be.
You will not have a #2 pencil. This will suddenly become a life-or-death matter upon which rests the fate of the entire world. You won’t have a #2 pencil, or you’ll have a no-name brand of mechanical pencil that doesn’t specify whether it’s a #2. You’ll ask the people around you, and they will not have any extras. They will, however, be happy to offer you some obscure mechanical pencil that may or may not be of the #2 variety. So that’s generous.
You’ll sit next to that person who knows everything. While you’re feverishly looking for a single answerable question, the guy next to you will be engaged in some serious rapid-fire page-flipping as he somehow answers twenty questions simultaneously.
You will forget everything. All those hours you spent slaving over the textbook will suddenly mean nothing. Your mind will go blank. You will realize that knowledge of shih tzu puppies, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Glee are occupying space in your brain that could otherwise have been occupied by exam material. Nothing on the exam will look familiar; in fact, the questions will look like Egyptian hieroglyphics. You might as well go right ahead and punch yourself in the face to bring it all home.
The good news here is that, realistically, all of these things probably won't happen to you. At some point in your life, a few of them will. But all of them? At one time? Probably not. And once you're sitting there in class with (hopefully) a #2 pencil in hand, and you look back and realize you managed to get here without falling on your face or spontaneously catching fire, you'll be able to focus on the exam and (hopefully) pass with flying colors.
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