For a few minutes I was calm, then I panicked and stayed that way a while. You can blame a sound technician.

Because I’m still paranoid about the listening test, I approached the sound booth whilst simultaneously retracing my mental steps to see if I’d actually tested both CDs before submitting them. I decided I had. Probably.

Then the sound technician arrived and started doing his pre-checks. The sound was a bit uneven with one speaker sounding low and the other sounding louder. I made a couple jokes about that and then he started to play the listening to double check his settings.

What I heard went something like “Number Two. It is my favorite superpower because scritchscritchscritchskipgoogoogooskipscritch Number Three.”

Panic set in and I thought about where I could buy a suit for the ensuing apologies until I realized he was just fast-forwarding the CD. However, after that I couldn’t calm down until the entire listening had finished.

Luckily, after that, everything went well. There was only one question and I got a chance to relax. Once my heart started beating regularly anyway.