Giddy as f*ck

Oh, yeah, I’ve been flying this morning, and feeling very silly.

I took my CBAP certification test yesterday, after a week of concentrated study and practice drills and one final exam simulation. I’d already taken one online proctored exam from them, for my CCA back in April, and I knew the drill. They’re very specific about you can’t have anything on your desk, and I had cleared mine (I thought), but it hadn’t occurred to me to empty the cubbyholes. So once I was online with the proctor, and had to slowly pan the room and the desk and under the desk with my webcam (an old one which isn’t very crisp), the proctor asked me repeatedly to clear my desk until I figured out what they meant – had to quickly dump all the cubbyholes into a box and push it off to the side.

The test was three and a half hours long, 210 minutes, and I needed almost all the time. I was allowed one break away from the desk, which I took. The proctor was doing a thorough job – I would get chat messages like, ‘please don’t cover your mouth’ while I was just sitting there in thought. I wonder what sort of machinations people go through to cheat?

But although some of the questions were ambiguously worded – and that’s frustrating, because a big part of being a BA is asking followup questions, ‘when you said X, did you mean XY or XZ?” and when you can’t, you have to just guess, which is bad. A lot of scenarios where you had to answer more than one question about it.

But! I finished, and selected “End Test” and after a couple of confirmation prompts, immediately got the feedback that I’d passed! OH THANK GOD.

I’d already been scripting my Tuesday one-on-one with my boss in my head. “Hey, remember when you interviewed me and I said I was studying for the CBAP? Well, I took the test this weekend and failed it, and I don’t think I’m going to retake it… unless you really want me to…?” But the actual conversation will be much more cheerful, I think.

And I don’t have to think about mind maps or data models or decision trees for quite a while now.

It’s been a while since I worked for an organization that gave secondary holidays like ~~Columbus Day~~ Indigenous Peoples Day off, but I have today off. I have some entertaining projects I can do if I feel like it, but I could also spend the day in the recliner with a detective novel.

Oh, this is bizarre. On FB, someone posted something to which I thought a funny reply would be “Men are the worst!”, and so I did. And got put in FACEBOOK JAIL for 24 hours for violating community standards! WTF? That’s really just kind of funny, but maybe a little distressing how much I disliked being in FB Jail. I couldn’t even like people’s posts! It was awful.

Especially since it was National Coming Out Day and many people’s posts were warm and wonderful and delightful. I recently joined a FB group where people post as if they were Nathan Pyle beings, and those Coming Out Day posts were particularly clever and funny. And I couldn’t ‘like’ them. Ah well.

Spookiness: we started watching the TV series of NOS4A2. I loved the book. The series isn’t grabbing me the way the book did. But some of it really works well. Zachary Quinto’s old-age makeup does not.

Saturday night we watched Escape Room, which was unintentional silly fun, and Sunday we watched the new animated Addams Family, which was intentional silly fun. I think Addams Family came and went last year with neither celebration nor censure, but I thought it was delightful, many laugh-out-loud moments.

Oh, and I did this to my oatmeal this morning: