Ever fail an exam before you actually take it :)
Yeah, this has been one hell of a day.
I get an email form the dept head who asks me to come see him before monday, when I'm supposed to take my exam. So I go up there and we sit down.
He tells me that my paper exam wasn't that good. Mostly due to a lack of preliminary data. This I knew. Since we seemed to have a very tight frame of time of when the exam was supposed to be in and done and I just finished work on the paper we were doing I haven't had time to run any experiments on the new stuff. Not to mention its new work for the lab so we don't just have piles of old data sitting around some where.
Needless to say he continues to tell me that he has spoken with the members of my committee and they have agreed that monday won't be my exam. But get this, I still have to give the presentation and answer questions just like it was the exam. It now just has the big informal stamp placed on it. Apparently my advisory committee should have caught that I'm a moron way before this point in time and put the kabosh on the whole dealie, but they didn't. So now I'm here, giving my presentation or some faxcimility of it on monday, but just getting feed back from it as if I had taken the exam and totally blown it. What a grand life I live.

P.S. Saw "just friends" last night. It was very funny. I highly suggest it to all of you who were nerdy in high school but had a bit of a crush on some friend of your's who was much cooler than you.