Today is October 1 which means, for the State of Illinois, a certain percentage of the population is either: (a) hitting “refresh” on their internet browser over & over again; (b) weeping with joy; (c) weeping with depression & visions of homelessness; or (d) weeping and not sure why. This is because traditionally on October 1, the results of the July seating of the Illinois bar exam are released to the poor applicants.

I say traditionally of course because I have no clue if the IBABY site crashed again, but in my year (2008)  they decided to go all crazy & change up the process of notification a mere two days prior to the results. Every year in years past they told you at the exam you’d find out mid-October. What this meant (and everyone knew) was that you’d log into the site on October 1, precisely at midnight during the shift from September 30 to October 1 & you could  see your results. Then a few days later you’d get a confirmation letter in the mail. This of course is unless you pulled a stunt like Law With Grace  & lost your log-in pin number in which case you couldn’t access your results online and instead you had to wait for the results in the mail. Snail mail. Agony.

Of course last year, a few days prior to October 1 this small little message popped up on the IBABY website with some sort of sick, twisted sentence that read something along the lines of:

Just F-ing Kidding With You

(Suckahs)

Then some sort of message about “a few days early” and “send you an email and THEN you log in” but it was sort of lost in translation and instead read: EARLY? MOTHER F-ING EARLY? WHAT? THE? FFFFFFFF? and at that moment thousands of nervous terrified twenty-somethings tried to log into the IBABY (Side Note: most tragic acronym ever)system (we were not waiting for no email) and proceded to bring the house down. And by bring the house down I mean we destroyed any semblance of the IBABY website & instead you got these tragic error messages and frozen screens and then…then the world imploded. At least in the world according to US and at that point, US was all that mattered.

Of course you know the end of the story: IBABY had to scold us all, and at some point the site started working intermittently but not before the “results” window came & went with no results & as a result of that there was no vodka or whiskey left in the Midwest and rumors of suit-wearing people talking to themselves and screaming at computer screens and wandering aimlessly at 2 am around city streets could be heard. I gave up around midnight the night of the 1st and instead went to bed, only to be woken every hour or so by a text from someone with a pleading message of “Have you checked?” and I was like “NO I HAVE NOT -I HAVEN’T SLEPT IN TWO DAYS AND I HATE THE WORLD AND IBABY AND STOP BOTHERING MAH BEAUTY SLEEPS” and finally at one point, in frustration and exhaustion and sleep, I thought I hit an “end” button on my iPhone and instead I opened the web browser which was clearly set to IBABY and suddenly, lo & behold I was logged in and the words “CONGRATULATIONS” were there and I sort of just blinked.

And blinked some more.

And then realized hey man, the site was working! And I passed!

And I never did get that email they promised me.