Test Day

I took the MCAT today in Bethesda at 8:00 AM. Perhaps I should repeat that: I had to be in Bethesda today at 8 AM to take a five-hour test.

Normally—that is, without traffic, so it’s probably more accurate to say abnormally—it takes about 45 minutes to get from my house to Bethesda. So in order to be there by eight, Rachel and I planned on me leaving the house at 6:15. I went out a bit earlier than that to start the car warming up, so when we left the house ready to leave the ice had begun losing its grip on my windows. Rachel told me to start the windshield wipers while she finished scraping the back windows. But Lo! Disaster was even then poised to strike. After I had hit the wipers a few times, Rachel came around to the front of the car, and started scraping the edges just as I hit the wipers again. The scraper connected violently with the wiper, irreparably tearing the whole apparatus clean off the metal arm.

After we realized we couldn’t fix it (certainly not in the dark), I followed her to work, nearly getting run off the road by a school bus who was trying to merge into a merge lane instead of out of it. At Rachel’s work I took her car the rest of the way to Bethesda and turned into a public parking garage near the testing center. Turns out that garage had metered parking. The kind of meters that take quarters, not the 21^st century ones in Baltimore that take credit cards. Of course, unlike me, Rachel doesn’t keep change in her car, preferring instead to keep the nearly-useless metal tokens in her purse. With five minutes until test time, I signed in and ran back outside to try and get money from the bank. D’oh! It didn’t open until 9 AM. I went to try the ATM, only to discover that I’d forgotten my PIN, again.

Finally I gave up and ran back to the testing center only to get yelled at by one of the proctors about being late. A whirlwind later, I was in the room taking the test. Naturally, the MCAT always starts with the physical sciences section, the hardest one of the four for me. Five hours later, I left the testing center and wept bitter tears. Or rather, I would have were I not restricted by my unwillingness to present such an emotional display in public view. I got back to the parking garage to find that not only had my car not been towed, it hadn’t even been ticketed. After dropping the car off at Rachel’s work, she took me out during her lunch break for Burger King. Perhaps it wasn’t completely bad after all.

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Rachel and I have been married nearly eight months (February 8th!) now, and it’s definitely been an adventure. I love retelling these kinds of adventures where both of us contribute in some way to a situation and have to deal with it as a couple. They’re definitely the kinds of things that even as they’re happening, there’s the sneaking suspicion that we’ll be laughing about it later. Readers, of course, have the advantage, because they get to skip directly to the laughing part.