The instructions said that at exactly whatever o’clock on that Friday night, you were to type your test and applicant numbers into the web form and press Submit. You would then find out if you passed the California Bar Exam. It’s been four months since you took the darn test, so by this point you’re pretty sure you failed, no matter how you felt during the exam itself. (Me, I’d felt good at first. Then I had nightmares for months, the most common that I’d left too early and missed a fourth day of testing. By the time the results came out, I remembered the nightmares more clearly than the test.)
Unlike most people, my job at the time wasn’t contingent on me passing the bar. But I still needed a win badly. In an 12-week period earlier that year, I had graduated law school without any desire to go into law; found out my family back East had just changed forever; impulsively borrowed a ton of money to study for a bar exam I didn’t need; and watched on TV as planes went into the Twin Towers, which in itself made any plans I did have feel even more stupid and pointless. In fact, what lay beyond that “Submit” button was starting to feel like a verdict on my entire life: if I failed the exam, it put into question my decision to go to law school in the first place, a decision which had taken me away from my family during their most difficult time. In fact, if I’d gone into the Army instead, like I’d originally planned, I might even have been doing something meaningful while people who hated my country took flying lessons and pictures of skyscrapers.
And so went the minutes and hours and weeks before whatever o’clock on that Friday night. But finally it was time, and I Submitted. At which point the website of the State of California Bar Examiners crisply informed me that I “did not appear on the list of successful applicants.” And so. The next moments belong to me and God. (I don’t have any memory of them.) About twenty minutes later, my brain interrupted to point out that several thousand people had just Submitted to the California Bar Exam in that same instant, which in those prehistoric times probably resulted in a small electrical fire in a server room somewhere in Sacramento. So I typed in my exam applicant numbers again and Submitted again. And was rejected again. And then again. And again. For twenty more minutes, I failed the California bar exam, my family, and my country, one Submission at a time.
And then someone or something gave in and unceremoniously announced that those numbers did, in fact, appear on the list of successful applicants after all, and I was free to wallow on with the rest of my life.