Grrrrrr

I had planned to take the Federal Air Marshal exam on August 6 in Anaheim, since I was going to be in California anyways for CHP testing. There were no exam sites in Utah, and the closest site to Spanish Fork was in Las Vegas. I was notified through email that I needed to take the exam as soon as possible, so I called up their HR line and gave them my reason for scheduling my exam 3 weeks out. I was told that it would be ok for me to wait. About a week later I received a call that all applicants who wished to be considered for open positions under this announcement needed to be done testing by the end of July.

I considered dropping out of the process, but ended up scheduling my test for Monday at 11:30 am in Las Vegas. Monday morning I woke up at 5:30, took a shower and got out on the road at 6am. The drive down was long and uneventful, and I got to the test site at about 11:00 am Vegas time. I started the test, and finished it with time to spare. I drove back home, and got back around 6:30 pm.

This test was accessible by internet. I could have taken the test in the basement here if I had a proctor. It was a little frustrating to have to spend that much time and money to take a test 6 hours away that should have been accessible much closer. It's not like a whole lot of training went in to making sure the proctor knew how to administer the test.

I think I did pretty well. I'm glad I made the trip at least, it's nice to keep as many options available as possible.

I also got my results for the Houston Fire Department exam. I scored 100. There were 770 people who took the test, and my 100 ranked me 73rd. There were 72 ex military guys who scored at least a 96 and got bumped ahead of me with their 5 points of veteran preference points. I was lucky that the raffle number I picked was near the top of the order, because I was the top non-military rank in the entire exam. It appears that I will be back in Houston to go to Orientation and run my PAT in October, which is great because it shouldn't be too hot and muggy while I'm out killing myself on their course. I'll also have an extra month of training in before I have to run it. I am fairly certain that with my rank, there will be enough people ahead of me that drop out of the running that I will have a spot in the January academy as long as I don't flunk out of the rest of the process. Some of those poor suckers are going to have to run their test in the middle of the September heat. There are supposed to be 60 spots in the academy.

I've bumped my running up to 3 miles at a time now. Yesterday I finished in 26:45, which still isn't great but it's getting easier. I'm doing my runs in the mid to late afternoons when it's super hot outside, hoping to at least train in worse conditions than I will be testing in. I'm hoping to push my runs to 4 miles at a time soon.