Today was the one year anniversary of a disaster that wasn’t actually my fault but I apologized for it. The funny part is, I didn’t even realize it was the one year anniversary, but I still felt nervous about it.

Today was the start of our high school exams which means 1) I’m about to get really busy for the next few days and 2) I’m already in denial. This isn’t that unusual.

However, both yesterday and today I had a surprising amount of stress about the exam. There’s always a little bit of stress if it’s a test you’ve written, but today’s was a higher level of stress than usual.

This morning I checked the test schedule three times and even as I was walking to school I checked my phone to make sure I wasn’t getting any “where the hell are you” calls and messages. It wasn’t until I saw, off in the distance, a colleague heading to work that I felt confident that I wasn’t missing the test.

Then, because I’m in charge of the year and the exam, I went down to get the listening test CD and carry it to the broadcast room. When the technician performed his initial tests everything seemed okay, but he had to turn the volume up pretty high. This made me worry the sound quality wasn’t good enough. I spent the 10 minutes before the exam pacing and had the script ready in case I had to perform it live.

During the broadcast everything seemed to go fine but I was waiting for the “we couldn’t hear the damned thing” calls. They never came. After the listening–which was unusually short this time; a subconscious reaction to last year, I guess–I went back to the office and waited for the calls indicating the students had questions and/or had found horrible mistakes. (Past example: instructions say write ONE word but answer requires TWO,)

No calls came. But I paced, sat down, paced, sat down and paced until the last 10 minutes when it was unusual to get questions.

Now I’m in the denial phase and it wasn’t until I did some checks to make sure I wasn’t repeating myself in one of these posts that I discovered where all that stress had come from.

Now I have to get back to work, or denial, both are okay.