reesesWeb

As I've mentioned before, Kat's taking the California Bar exam in a couple weeks. The California exam is the most difficult of it's kind in the country, with an insanely low pass rate, somewhere around 45%. The New York State exam is of similar difficulty, but with a much higher pass rate. The accepted theory on this is that a lot of "nontraditional" applicants take the test in CA. By nontraditional, I mean people who don't have a law degree.

For people from Kat's law school, the first time pass rate on the CA bar is around 60%. Kat graduated near the top of her class, but despite this, THE WOMAN IS A SEETHING BALL OF STRESS. I've tried to ease her terror with statistics, but she went to law school for the exact same reason almost anyone does -- she wanted to do grad school, but she sucked at math, and didn't think she could pass that portion of the GRE. As a result, a strictly quantitative argument hasn't been an effective strategy.

It's been more like "whack-a-mole". A problem comes up, I solve that specific issue, and keep alert for the next problem. This is obviously not a long-term solution, but after the 28th of this month, it doesn't have to be -- until she starts looking for a job.

Last night, the anxiety reached its greatest acuteness. For the past few weeks, her laptop (a T40 I bought a couple years ago) started making a bearing failure noise. I swapped out the hard drive since she was short on space anyway, but the noise has returned. The only other rotating piece in the machine are fans, and a fan failure could be either catastrophic or not a big deal.

She asked how bad it was, and I told her precisely that. Years of consulting have not completely pounded into my head the necessity of the simplifying lie. I am a moron.

She called me into the living room, which has become Bar-study-central (there's no way I'd let that creature into my study at this point in time), to listen to the intermittent sound the laptop was making. "Yup, sounds like a fan."

"Do I need to replace it?"

"Well, the risk is pretty low that it's going to fail in two weeks, and the risk is lower that this will kill your laptop. That fan only comes on when it's warm, so it's not completely essential to continued operation."

At this point, she cried. Not bawling, break down crying, but little weepy "my life sucks" type crying.

I'll take a little liberty here and say that my response to this was,"Wtf beyotch?"

"They say that anything that can go wrong on the Bar, will."

This is her justification?

Needless to say, my universal policy of "throw money at any problem that can be solved that way, and throw money at anyone who can solve the problems that can't," has proven not to be the most scalable one from a pecuniary perspective. I was reminded of this yet again as I scrambled to ibm.com to find an acceptable replacement laptop that could be here next week, before we leave for San Francisco. To add to the difficulties, all of the 1400x1050 T43s on ibm/thinkpad/lenovo.com turned into a completely unacceptable 1024x768 during configuration and checkout. I went through the froogle.com ordeal that is familiar to everyone -- search on a piece of hardware and try to pick the least disreputable looking vendor.

On the bright side, I'll get a hand-me-down T40 (no p) for the price of a new laptop.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | technorati