From: Scott Smith (hioctane@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Oct 12 2006 - 11:10:41 ART
First, I'd like to thank God for giving me the ability and desire, and
my wife and daughter for all their support over the last 2 years.
A big thanks to all the folks who support this group and the guys at IE.
For prep I used IE's workbook as well as their CoD. Great work guys! I
hope to do some teaching soon and you guys are a perfect example of
how it should be done.
This was my 3rd attempt and it was an adventure. I didn't sleep a wink
the night before. It wasn't nerves so much as it was just being fired
up and ready to kick some tail. By the time I sat down in my cube I
had been awake for 24hrs. The combination of caffeine and adrenaline
had me feeling pretty good. After about an hour or two my lack of
sleep really started to be a problem. I was making so many mistakes
with the most simple of tasks forcing me to waste time troubleshooting
stupid stuff like applying a config to the wrong interface. Things
I've done a hundred times seemed so difficult. By the time our lunch
break hit I wasn't even finished with IGP. Tired, upset and depressed
all I wanted to do was lay down on the couch in the lobby and sleep.
After lunch I still wasn't doing well. My brain was still misfiring as
I tried to fend off that little voice in my head telling me to quit
and get some sleep. With about two hours to go I went outside to get
some air and gave myself a good talking too:-) I came back in with a
new outlook and things started to go much better as my brain came back
to life (2nd wind?). I ripped through the remaining tasks and still
had over an hour to verify every task. I found and fixed several
issues from the AM but after tallying up the points I thought I was
still short. I left a little early and was 95% sure I had failed again
but I was ok knowing I gave 100% and didn't quit when quiting would
have been easy. I spent the flight home thinking about the upcoming Me
vs Cisco round 4 and dreading opening the books again. With all the
flight delays I didn't get home till nearly 11p and decided to check
my email just to see... and... bingo! I sat in absolute shock for like
5 minutes. I did a "print screen", closed my browser and logged back
in just to see if it was real :-) I then went running through the
house yelling I PASSED, I PASSED (lol)... scared the heck out of my
wife, daughter and dog.
This has been by far the most difficult thing I've ever done and boy
am I glad it is over!
-Scott
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Nov 01 2006 - 07:29:05 ART