The exams are coming, but honestly, I'm not bothered. It's probably because they are pass/fail, but it's also because a large part of me has been conditioned since young to deal with exams and the stress that comes with them. Going through them is routine to me now, so much that it's almost comfortable. I know it sounds weird, but that's really the way it is with me.
I suffered from exam fever as a boy, like I'd literally get a fever before the exams started, for no real reason. And since my birthday always fell smack right in the middle of exams, it'd meant that I spent my birthday feverishly doing them, in more ways than one. It sounds like the kind of birthday nobody would want. Well, that was mine. You can't choose your birthday, but you can choose whether you want to fail your exam or not.
Not like it mattered, because doing badly was never an option. Not when your classmates never did badly, and if you did you'd bottom the class. I know because I slipped up once and when my teacher flashed the marks on the class projector, I found myself 2nd from bottom. The only reason I wasn't last? Because every class has that one guy who has given up. And I told myself I never wanted to be there again. I never went back.
Serving NS though was the most stressful period of my life. My platoon was permanently understaffed and overworked, with one guy doing the work of four. Our job was being phased out, so we were trained to perform a new one as well. This meant each of us did two jobs, but they gave us only half the people because there weren't enough tiger year babies.
I don't know why nobody likes tiger babies because they are cute. They're furry, and if you enter their enclosure with a bucket they'll play with you. They might kill you, but that's really because you needed a better bucket. But anyway, people were stressed, and the daily working environment was best described as tempestuous.
During exercises, trying to survive even one day was insane. I often found myself running 5 other guys, when it wasn't even my job, because no one else could do it. Certainly not my superiors, who were honestly just inept. Of course my superiors would take all the credit when stuff actually went well, I mean, this is the army. But still, I did it because I wanted to book out on Friday night.
I ran cables under vehicles, a tiring job in a dark, dirty and extremely warm environment, especially in the afternoons when steam rose off the roads. And every 5 minutes I would be interrupted by people asking me how to do this and that, when I was already having a very hard time. I also had grumpy superiors who would be in my face about why their lines were down, when it wasn't my fault some idiot drove a Land Rover over the lines I spent an afternoon laying and snapped them.
Sometimes I just wanted to scream like "just f*** off okay" but I couldn't because if I lost it, I would have 5 guys staring blankly at me, an angry superior, and the job would remain undone. And everyone was on a short fuse here. One person goes off, everyone has a meltdown, and we might as well kiss our weekend goodbye, because we would never get anything done now. Not when we were too busy slagging each other off to work together.
But often, the mere thought of spending Saturday and Sunday in the same bunk as these people, who are equally pissed that they got confined, was enough to make you bite your tongue and work. I think it taught me a lot on how to deal with difficult people, because I had to tread around landmines so much it became second nature. It also bred in me a permanent dislike of heated and open confrontation.
In the most difficult parts of NS, you see how people just give up because it's 3am and we've already worked 12 hours straight, yet we had to grit our teeth and finish because if we didn't, we'd get punished. You see people carrying equipment till their arms give way, and everyone else is just too tired to prevent it from crashing to the ground. You see people breaking ranks and scolding their superiors with tears in their eyes, because they are just so tired they don't give a shit anymore.
And the superiors don't know what to say, because they know it's not that we don't want to serve and give our best, but sometimes, it's just too much. I am still proud that I gave 2 years for my country though, even if it took a lot out of me doing it, so much that I still get bad dreams about the worst times I endured.
After having lived in an environment like this for a full year, nothing school related really fazes you anymore. Exams? Bah.