Forgetfulness is a human thing, and it happens to the best of us. The severity and frequency though, differs from person to person. Much as it hurts to say, I am one of the most forgetful people I know. A lot of the people around me think I do it on purpose because I don’t care or pay attention to things, but it’s really never deliberate. On the outside, it’s difficult to understand what I’m saying because you’re thinking “Well, if it’s so important, you wouldn’t forget”. Or “Well, if you want to remember, you will”. But it doesn’t work like that. Closest thing I can liken it to is just like how you study well for an exam and your brain dips on you in the exam hall. Is the exam not important enough? Do you not want to remember?
It’s easy to declare that people who are forgetful are like that because they just consider the forgotten things trivial. Where you begin to question your assumptions are when they forget things that are of high importance and priority to themselves.
About 5 months ago, I was preparing for this very expensive exam (about GHC4,000) that was important for something I was pursuing at the time. Fortunately, I found an organization that was willing to pay for me to write said exam. Their sponsorship came with catches though: first, you had to write and pass 4 different mock exams they were organizing, to show proof that you could pass the actual exam itself if you took it. 3 of these mock exams were online in a sort of an asynchronous learning environment. They provided materials to study and take the tests, and paced the mock exam at 1-month intervals.
I prepared, wrote and passed all 3 online mocks, so the next and final mock exam was in person. To write this one, you had to select your center. The test centers were in Kumasi and Accra. They released the scores of the candidates whose average aggregate scores made it past the pass mark, and sent us emails to select and confirm our test centers for the final mock. I check my email more than I check WhatsApp or any other app. Normally. But at the time I was preparing for this exam, I also had just taken up a job in a company that was literally a leach for time and attention. I was working crazy hours and always came home tired and sleepy. I barely had time to do anything else. So, my social and personal life had fallen apart. Those days, I could go 2 days without checking my email.
I remember coming back from work on a Thursday evening one day and checking my mail to see that I passed all 3 mocks and was required to select a mock test center for the final mock. The deadline to do this was in 2 days (deadline was on Saturday). But because of how tired I was, I said I’d sleep and do it the next day, since it was a simple task that wouldn’t take more than 2 minutes to do. I procrastinated. Interestingly, I had the meetup in the picture in my cover photo to attend on Saturday night, and got stranded in the middle of Tema because we closed pretty late and it was raining. I was lucky that one of the people I had just become friends with there called their dad to come pick them up, and they gave me a ride to my sister’s place, which although far, was the nearest place for me since I wouldn’t get a car back to mine that late in the night. So if you’ve been seeing me use the pictures in this post often, now you know the lore behind them. Lore. Lol
I bunk at my sister’s place, spend the entire day doing another thing which had an approaching deadline that day, and find out just after I finished that, that my test center selection deadline had passed! I emailed the organization to see if it was still possible to select my test center and they said no. They said it would be unfair to my colleagues because the deadline was another way to weed out some applicants and I happen to have fallen in that pile. I was disappointed, but I couldn’t be mad because I understood their position. I just took it in good faith and have been very very cautious about dates and deadlines since then.
