From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Sun Oct 05 2003 - 14:51:15 GMT-3
At 10:27 AM -0400 10/5/03, Scott Morris wrote:
>You will actually get a letter (you should get this upon completion of
>the ICP stuff you did), but Cisco will send you a little laminated card
>with your CCSI number and name and all that jazz along with the chunk of
>legal information about all of the fun things you are and are not
>allowed to do.
>
>Welcome to the instructor's world!
>
>
Hmmm...I wonder if I could get a replacement card and certificate,
even if it says retired? I'm rather proud of that, especially since
it was an "old-style" (i.e., pre-CCIE) number (93005).
At the time, to get my provisional certification had me out at the
Cisco lab for 4 or 5 weeks. At least 2-3 of those weeks were either
in hospital or recovering.
One day, early in my observed teaching, the proctor gave me a hard
time and pulled me out, telling me he'd let me know when and if he'd
again let me in front of a class. He berated me for appearing to have
no energy and being mentally scattered.
I wonder how many CCIE candidates have had the opportunity that I did
to get a bit of revenge by inducing the guilt I did, when I called
Larry from intensive care the next day? It really wasn't his fault --
I had had a recurrence of a heart blockage, and had a successful
angioplasty that week. It wasn't a heart attack as such, but I
definitely wasn't moving enough blood to the brain and was having
assorted weird symptoms.
Actually, I had a zing-the-proctor-equivalent in El Camino Hospital
in Mountain View (incidentally, a generally superb hospital). My
initial reason for deciding something was physically wrong was that I
had been getting a heart drug adjusted, and had a standing order that
let me go to the hospital daily, get blood drawn and tested, be given
the results, and I would decide how to adjust the dose. My
assumption was that my symptoms were due to a low potassium level.
I left Cisco, had dinner, still felt weird, and decided to go to the
hospital. In the emergency room, I was hooked up to a cardiac monitor
(think Sniffer equivalent) and set aside for a time. Watching the
cardiac monitor, I made the diagnosis of part of the problem, and
then saw some disturbing changes (think beginning by seeing bad TCP
sequence numbers and then seeing several short-duration broadcast
storms).
Pushing the proctor...I mean nurse call button...I politely said to
the somewhat harried nurse "I seem to have developed an ST segment
depression and have had several runs of bigeminy and trigeminy in the
last ten minutes. Do you think I could have some aspirin, have blood
drawn for cardiac enzymes, and have somebody decide if a lidocaine
and perhaps heparin drip is in order?" This is sort of like telling
the proctor to fix the hardware, down to the specific board to be
replaced. In this case, of course, I was the hardware. ;-(
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