The Telltale Test

I am positively tired of studying for the GMAT - its wrecking havoc in my daily (or everyday?) life.

I am haunted by the passive voice - nay, the passive voice haunts me. I not only strive for parallelism, but also aim at precision. I incessantly cut down wordiness and constantly reduce redundancy.

I routinely critique my manager's emails for underlying assumptions, and am constantly engaged in rewording my own to make them (the emails, if you still haven't caught on) more persuasive. Even as I write email, I pause after my lines...thoughts swirl in my mind: "I will follow up on this" (..shouldn't this be a would?). "...it is something I'd love to do" (ambiguous 'it'...is this awkward and redundant?). I pick on my manager's emails (in my mind) for misplaced modifiers or ambiguous pronouns.

Just today, I sent an email that started with : "While it is true that specifying XYZ would serve to our advantage, I believe that deferring this until next quarter would prove even more beneficial". I've been using words like evident, notion, belief, assumption, hypothesis, redundant, ... so often that I suspect everyone around me knows I'm taking the GMAT.

These days, I always number my reasons - and leave an empty line between 2 paragraphs. I even have started using a 0.7 mm pencil instead of my favorite pen, and prefer taking notes on letter-sized sheets instead of the notebook. What's more, I must conserve my paper, for I have only 6 sheets of paper a day. Oh, and I sit at my work-desk in slots of 75 minutes, breaking for exactly 5 minutes in between. I have timed myself - I take 30 seconds in the loo, another 30 to wash my face with cold water (the holy books say it's gotta be cold), 2 minutes to down a can of coke, and another minute to walk back to my desk. I have another minute as buffer, to regain my breath, and dive back in.

While driving to work, I try not to look at other cars and their license plates. Numbers like 43, 37 and 101 are devious and prime. They make me cringe, for I cannot cross-out common factors. On the other hand, I am very nice to drivers with plates that have numbers like 4096 and 8649 - they are perfect squares, and all perfect squares have an odd number of prime factors. At the lights, I know I have an average of just 2 minutes until it turns green - so, my mind races to find possible values for A and B, since the plates I see in front of me read: AXB(=)1101. I hate driving on interstates - I start thinking of the number of different ways I could choose a lane if 2 of the 5 lanes are occupied. It gets convoluted on a circle (Dupont Circle, if you are in DC) - clockwise and anti-clockwise are the same.

I can hear the voices you know - they are so close! It's just a matter of time now - I am nervous, for I must not fail, yet excited in a strange way.

I'm also ready to buy a drink to anyone who (or that?!) can (could? god!) help me get over this.

(Crudely adapted and force-fitted from Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart)