Hi, Well I have decided to do a full write up on the experience, mainly to get it off my chest and to maybe help other people with the experience.

So I had my lab booked for Monday 15th of December,  I don’t live in Sydney so flew in on Sunday afternoon and obviously stayed in a hotel for the night, The hotel is the Urban St Leonards, Good hotel and I will be staying there next time.

Sunday afternoon/evening was fairly uneventful, I arrive at the hotel around 4pm. So I went for a walk to the Cisco offices to double check I knew where they were ( been there before for other reasons ) and just spent about half an hour walking around the streets, During this time I was visualizing myself in the lab, Practicing keeping my anxiousness,excitement and adrenaline under control :).  The rest of the night was spent watching tv and I got to bed very early, Managing a solid 8 hours sleep, Awesome!.

Monday morning I woke around 6, Which gave me heaps of time to shower, breakfast and check out of the hotel, So around 7:50  I headed down to the Cisco offices, Which was about 10minute walk, Upon arriving there was already 3 other people there, I think one guy was really nervous as he was just about bouncing out of the chair. So I sat there for about 40minutes as the Proctor ( Scott, great guy really tries to put everyone at ease ) was marking a Voice exam.

8:40 - Proctor comes out, check everyones id and gives gives us name tags with rack numbers and track on them. We then head into the briefing area.  In here we are given the run down on do’s and dont’s for the Exam, dietary requirements for lunch. All belongings put into a locker, With the first task being finding the correct locker ;).

8:55 - We head into the lab area, Just desk’s with computer, Lab booklets, 2 sheets of numbered paper. The voice area also had phones! As for the exam everyone know’s there is an NDA, so I can’t say anything else about it.

As I read through the exam I thought I could do it, I have done practice lab’s which were way harder and passed them! This was my down fall, I got lazy and screwed myself! I know this now and I deserved to fail based on that assumption.

5:19 - I left the exam room, I thought I had done enough to get myself over the 80point mark, I actually thought I had 98 points. The Proctor asked me about 3 times was I sure that I was done, So there was no doubt at all that I wanted to leave.  The next 4 hours involve taxis, the airport, beer, broken planes, working planes and finally arrive home  5 hours later.  I live a 3 hour drive from Sydney….

I check my email with my mobile, See a notification that my score report is in. Can’t login to check until I get home.. The car ride was a very long trip. So we get home, I poured another beer and sat down to check it out. My girl is standing right behind me, Logged into the Cisco ccie website, and there it is…. FAIL…  At this point I think I wanted to cry, I posted the following on twitter   ” Failure tastes like Kilkenny ” and ” I think my heart just got broken ” It was devastating. I have never failed anything before that I really tried to achieve until now and the feeling of your organs being ripped out is not pleasant,  The rest of the night was spent in a drunken stupor trying to work out why, staring at my percentages and wanting to hit something.  I ended up in bed at some stage.

The next morning in a more sober mood, I felt sorry for my girl, She didn’t know what to do the previous night and kept trying to cheer me up, But if you had failed this lab you know nothing can cheer you up. So i’m sorry Mel :).  I did have a surprise when I checked my email, It appeared that I ordered a recheck of my lab! Silly drunk me.

My trip to work on Tuesday morning was interesting, I had a really bad feeling that people would be dissapointed in my failure, But I had people congratulate me for even attempting the lab.  By about 11am I had enough of sulking and got stuck back into study, I had a new study plan which heavily involves my weaker areas and I will be passing the lab in February.

If you managed to get through my rambling wall of text than congrats! and I have left my Original Post here just for reference:

Well yesterday was my lab date, and to sum it up very briefly I failed.  Not going to go into details but I thought I had passed even with a couple of silly mistakes I know I made. I know it was very close.

Had a few to many beers last night and requested a re-read from Cisco. Not holding my breath on that at all and Now I plan to kick the Lab’s ass in the first week of February 09.     That gives me 5 weeks of study on a couple of weak areas not including christmas.

So stay tuned kids Because I will get those digits!