Klowns in my Koffee

I spent five hours this morning in a classroom at St. Thomas desperately filling in circles with my No.2 pencil. The pass rate on the Certified Quality Engineer test is somewhere between 42 and 55% depending on the test years reported. The American Society for Quality does not officially release that statistic but it becomes known. I suspect the point of leakage is a man with polyester Sansabelt slacks and a short-sleeved Oxford shirt on a business trip sitting in a bar and trying to think of anything -- anything at all -- that he knows that could impress that woman over there. ("Hey, baby, what I know about analysis of variance could fill a book. Want to sit yourself on down and talk about acceptance sampling?" "Sadly, sir, I'm in a reduced sampling mode at Level III normal and your accept number is zero.")

If you were a quality engineer, that would be a really funny line. Trust me on that. You'd snort until the mechanical pencil fell off your ear.

I don't know whether I passed or not. I'm probably near the cut-off. I calculated with a confidence level of 95% that my score was between 78 and 85 percent correct. That's the type of thing they make you do on this test.

The official line is that the scores are so low because people don't prepare well enough and come in cocky. So if most test takers were stupid or hung over, I probably squeaked through. The other people in the room looked fairly intelligent and prepared. Except for that one guy. The guy who looked like his mother dressed him in his polyester pants and his big old belt. He was wearing cop shoes. You know the ones that are black, weigh 15 pounds each, and are large enough for a cat to nestle inside if they weren't scared by the white socks. If you find out the test stats, don't tell him. I think we've found our leak.