12 October 2017
Today the Exam Pixies put smiley face stickers on the tamper-proof party bags. Still the candidates look glum. The Pixies begin to lose patience. I apply WD40 to three desks, a couple of window frames and all of the ladies’ toilet seats. Also a stapler. They do not need it, but I have to pass the time somehow. Otherwise, the day is about as tedious as you can get. The Lead Invigilator and I fight for jobs to do, even escorting people to the toilets. (We do not escort them all the way in, of course; we just loiter outside looking embarrassed and hoping not to be arrested for stalking. And it has to be said that fighting over the chance to stand outside a toilet door looking embarrassed is pretty sad, even by my standards. But this is how it gets to you if you invigilate for too long.) There are so few jobs to be done, during eight hours’ worth of invigilation, that by the end of the day the fight has become ungentlemanly. If a candidate so much as reaches up to scratch their head, we jump to attention, glare at one another and start purposefully towards the perpetrator. We are ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice, to hand out paper and answer queries and indeed fend off dragons if necessary in the interests of an orderly examination. When a helicopter has the temerity to pass overhead, I can tell the Lead Invigilator is all for heading off to Sort Things Out again. But even he, with his advanced invigilator training, is unlikely to be able to intercept a passing Chinook. I spend a bit of time arranging my provisions. On the desk in front of me: a can of Red Bull (pre-opened, to avoid distracting the candidates); four boiled sweets, of which I am allowing myself one an hour; some non-distracting grapes; two biscuits (non-crunchy) (ie stale); a book of join-the-dot puzzles, for when Ms Sear is not looking; an elastic band to fiddle with; and the remains of the WD40. This is all I have to look forward to. So then I read the exam papers. I discover in the morning that I can still just about draft a patent claim, but in the afternoon that I no longer know anything about trade marks, other than a vague notion that if you try to re-sell branded products across EU borders you are likely to get told off. Not by Ms Sear, obviously: Ms Sear is in charge of telling off invigilators and incompetent printers, and potentially also the drivers of ride-on lawn mowers, but her remit does not extend to parallel imports. By mid-afternoon, I am wishing the Brizzle candidates could be a little less well-behaved. I long for someone to do something dastardly, like steeling a banana off another candidate’s desk for instance, or phoning a friend, or throwing their papers in the air and flouncing out. Nobody does any of these things. I begin to lose all sense of time. I gave in and ate my boiled sweets in the first 55 minutes, even though they tasted of WD40. I have joined all the dots in the puzzle book and the elastic band has exceeded its elastic limit. Which was unfortunate, because it catapulted one of the biscuits into a box of exam scripts. The Red Bull is no longer sufficient to keep my eyelids off my cheekbones. Unfortunately there is no such thing as Invigilator-Strength Red Bull, but there should be. It would have to carry a government health warning.
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