Waiting

I have been at this since 1 this morning and as the clock strikes 8:30, I find the entire experience to be both stressful and slightly hilarious even if it is akin to waiting for the bar exam results.

"This" refers to waiting for the results of the medical licensure examinations. My best friend took the exams for two weekends and she told me that the list of those who successfuly passed the exam should have come out last night, at the latest today. As of this writing, there are no updates from either of our ends. The results were supposed to be posted in the official website of the PRC and when I checked with Google last night, all other sites such as blogs and forums were also announcing that they too would post the results as soon as they were ready.

That all together struck me as surreal. My parents took the board exams back in the 70s and the results of their board exams came out after about five or six months. My best friend, on the other hand, hurdled the last cluster of exams on Sunday and the waiting period for her had been drastically reduced to just a number of days. Back during my parents' time, the results were posted on reams of paper and people had to fall in line to check if their names were on the list. With the advent of the Internet, my best friend and I need not go anywhere but just sit in front of the computer and wait. Not only that, to factor in a human element to the torture, as I browsed through forum posts and comments to blog entries, I practically felt the anxiousness of the med students who took the examination as they put their ordeal to tangible form through blog comments and forum posts...people I didn't even know. I figured that generally, the advances in communications technology had certainly done their part in making the wait slightly less unpleasant.

I was browsing through a blog site which was creative enough to make a red, flashing marquee-like header for the medical licensure exam results. I was not sure exactly if that helped with soothing the stress levels but the blog entry claimed that the passing rate was about 70% according to a source. People then started posting comments to the blog entry until finally someone named Vince wrote that he had a leaked copy of the results. The inquiries then came like a flood with people asking if Mr. So and So or Miss XYZ was in the list. He answered some of the inquiries but gave vague answers like, "Two of the three from School ABC did not make it." Then as quickly as he came, Vince just disappeared from the deluge of very angry med students who finally figured out he was taking them for a joy ride.

I thought it was cruel for someone to turn someone else's anxiety into web fodder. These people, like my best friend and me, had been waiting since the wee hours of the morning for the results and it certainly was not funny to make up some story about having a leaked copy of the results. As a matter of fact, I thought it was downright inhumane.

I am sure as you are reading this, you must be wondering why I didn't think of visiting the most reliable source online for the results of the physicians licensure exam. I did figure early on that the best way to get the news was through the official website of the PRC (http://www.prc.gov.ph). But, as they say, when it rains, it pours. And this applies to almost all things, I suppose, including stress-inducers.

Before visiting any other blog site at 1 in the morning, I had first typed in the URL for the official PRC website in the address bar of my browser and waited for the page to load. Voila! I didn't get a website which hinted at a website of the PRC! Instead, I got a maroon background with some text written inside a box. An icon of a police officer was pictured on the left hand corner of the box and the page carried a warning that the PRC website was classified by Google as an "attack site." When I clicked a button to provide me with more information, I found out that when Google tested the PRC site, malware was downloaded and installed without the user's consent.

I sighed as the comments of seething rage continued to be hurled at Vince in the blog site. I wasn't about to tell my best friend to just unplug the computer and go to the PRC but sometimes, there are things such as Vinces and viruses which you don't worry about when you're simply falling in line and waiting for reams of paper to make their grand appearance.