Studying for CCIE has broken my brain


I had a really weird dream last night. My first dream about the CCIE exam. It didn't go well, and I failed.

So there I was sitting in a classroom. It was one I had been in before, for a CCIE preparation course. Not  abad classroom, the proctor had taught us before (please note that the proctor was not anyone I actually recognise in real-life. Note that no matter how evil Narbik's labs might be, he will give you proper routers... but more of that in a moment.

It was the troubleshooting portion of the exam.

The environment was not like anyone else's experience. The TS tasks were taken from a printed manual, but thankfully (or so I thought) the first ticket (EIGRP) was one that we had done in the class.

The manual was pretty big, and the pages very thin, so getting to page 28, or whatever it was proved complicated, as I kept on losing my place.

When it came to configuring the routers, well, let's just say that it was going to be hard task. No actual routers to play with, not even virtual... What I was given was this:


Yep, that's right. Dream-brain forced me to try and configure EIGRP on LEGO. But that's ok, because I knew which bit it was. I have labelled it clearly for you all, just in case you don't know the relationship between the different IGPs and different Lego pieces (that lives in my brain).

Seriously. Lego? But at least you can see the network link coming from the back of it, ready to connect to another router. So it has that going for it.

Anyway, after about 40 minutes of not being able to configure EIGRP on a bit of fucking Lego, I started to complain.

What did I complain about? Not that it was sodding Lego, no. That would have made sense. No, I complained that the online documentation was not available, and that I kept losing my place in the instruction book. Clearly these are the important factors here.

Needless to say, I failed and turning four bits of Lego into a fully working network.

That's pretty much all of the dream that I can remember. But it was pretty fucked up.
Is this how bad it has become, that not only am I dreaming about the exam, I am dreaming about failing the exam, for bullshit reasons.

I think it's clear that I am a little nervous about sitting the exam, and maybe I shouldn't eat cheese biscuits before bed.

Looks like my brain is getting a bit screwed with all the studying. Nerves are starting to kick in.

86 days to go.

I think its going to get a hell of a lot worse, before it gets better.

CCIE #49337, author of CCNA and Beyond, BGP for Cisco Networks, MPLS for Cisco Networks, VPNs and NAT for Cisco Networks.

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1 comments:

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Anonymous
14 April 2015 at 20:53 delete

That was hilarious! Let us know if you dream about L3 VPNs. I'd love to see that!

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