Can't Have Nothin' Nice

Last Saturday I took the admissions tests for Mensa. Unlike my previous attempt, I was not a week early. I was 35 minutes early.

When the entire credibility of your organization is based on the professed intellectual superiority of your membership, there's a lot of pressure involved, one would think, for Mensa activities to be so well planned and so well thought out so as to leave the participants in awe. But rather than being awe-full, it was awful (I'm so clever... they ought to let me in based on that alone).

Actually, to be more precise, it was ALL FULL. As in cramped. As in too many people showing up. As in 16 people. And the organizer, WHO IS A MENSA MEMBER, only brought 8 tests and had reserved a room for 8 people, despite the fact that the Mensa web site specifically stated that the Redwood City testing site was walk-in registration friendly.

Quite the conundrum. We had all been waiting outside the library since 9:30, which is what the web site said to do, only to find that THE LIBRARY DIDN'T OPEN UNTIL 10:00. Which is, of course, something I discovered last week during my premature Mensa attempt. But I figured that since the testing was actually going to happen, there would be a Mensa member present outside the library to let us fill out our registration forms and pay our $30 to get a chance to be in their exclusive club. In fact, the testing coordinator had even emailed me telling me to show up at 9:30. And so I did. But the aforementioned testing coordinator, WHO IS A MENSA MEMBER, didn't even show up until 9:50, and she, lamely, waited outside the library with the rest of us until they opened their doors at 10:00, which, surprisingly, is what the sign on the library door said would happen.

So we get inside and the testing coordinator, WHO IS A MENSA MEMBER, says there are far too many people there to take the test and could some of us please wait until next month to take the test in San Francisco or Campbell. Nobody budged. She continued to berate us, saying that she had only received notice that 6 people were coming (I was one of those 6) and that the others would need to leave because the room she had reserved at the library was just too small for all of us to fit in comfortably and it would just get so hot in the room with that door shut. "Can't we just keep the door open?" I innocently inquired. Scrambling to recover, this woman, WHO IS A MEMBER OF MENSA, said she would HAVE TO shut the door during the test because the testing room was near the computers with software for English learners and we might be distracted "by people talking loudly in - *slight look of disgust on her face* - Spanish."

Amazingly, 8 wannabe geniuses took the bait and left.

So on to the tests we went.

The first test was 50 questions with a time limit of only 12 minutes. My #2 pencil blazed across my page as I performed mind-bending feats of mathematical and linguistic logic. Well, not exactly. It was pretty straightforward, but the time crunch made it difficult. I like to check my answers and do everything twice, but the format of the test made that impossible. The testing coordinator said we wouldn't finish and I got through about 44 of the questions. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

The second battery of tests, called the California Test Of Mental Maturity, quickly deflated my pompous a$$. The first test was about opposites. We were to look at a picture of something and then choose the opposite of that picture from four other pictures. The sample question, which as you know is supposed to be incredibly easy to just give you the gist of how that test section will work, showed a picture of a white cowboy hat. The answer choices were a beret, a blender, a hat made out of a newspaper, or a black cowboy hat. The answer, to no one else's surprise in the room except mine, was the hat made out of the newspaper. For the next five minutes, I struggled to find pictures that were the opposites of skirts, brick walls, and meat thermometers. What the hell is the opposite of a meat thermometer?!?

Once all was said and done, we received a free Mensa pencil for our efforts. I need to score in the top 2% of either test to qualify for membership, and I'll find out the results in 6 to 8 weeks.

The next day, Sunday, I, SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE A MENSA MEMBER, tripped over my brand new $1200 laptop (yes, it was on the floor; yes, I fell asleep on the floor 6 nights in a row last week; yes, that's pathetic; no, actually it's pretty comfortable), kicking the lid shut and shattering the LCD screen. The cost to replace it? About $600.

Can't have nothin' nice!