Fret Dreams

It's finals time again, and I'm waiting for the first night I wake up in a cold sweat, just knowing I've slept through a final or that I checked the schedule wrong and the final was last week, not next week. It doesn't help that I'm taking exams on alternate days, since all of my exams were scheduled within 48 hours, so I have to keep track of what days I moved each exam to.

What's funny is that my dad starts to have the same sort of dreams when I am in finals even though he hasn't been in school for about 30 years. It doesn't help that it actually happened to him once. He and I have similar study patterns, and he told me when I was an undergrad about the time he studied harder for a final than he ever had. He decided to take one section of his notes, study it for days, and then move on to the next section. When he got to the last page of notes, he saw that he had written down the exam time had been changed... to 2 days ago. So he flat out missed the entire final.

Luckily for him he went to the professor's office and he was understanding and let him take it late, without penalty. This still shocks me since he went to one of the largest Big Ten schools and usually professors are so busy they don't want to mess with the problems of one student. But I guess he and my brother share the quality where they can talk their ways into or out of any situation. Somehow, I don't think I inherited that trait.