I Took an IT Exam

CompTIA A+ Core 1, Motherfuckers

Yeah, I know. What the fuck is happening, right?

I asked myself the same question as I stepped into the creaky four-mirrored elevator that would take me to the seventh floor of this filthy gothic office building at 4.15 on a Friday.

“You’re a fucking writer, Frank, not a computer geek,” said my dishevelled reflection gazing out at me past a forty-nine-year-old, dried-out face. And he was right. I’d taken my usual U-turn on my cooking studies after twelve months of cooking school and a few months of working in kitchens with angry veterans around sharp knives and hot fires. And I’d put all my attention into studying computers. I’d bought myself a couple of black hoodies and I was learning Russian and watching the nineties movie ‘Hackers’ and The Matrix and pretending I was Neo sitting at the Linux terminal doing something important and more Hollywood than changing the ownership on .txt files with some weird code like chmod 755.

The arthritic elevator doors creaked open and I found myself in a stifling, airless room faced with a few lockers, a noisy fridge and a young Asian woman behind a desk.

“Yes, I’m here for the A plus exam,” I said. I don’t know how it goes. I’ve never been to one of these damn things before. The information online basically said you turn up and they strip search you and take your smart watch and then you sit in a room with a computer. Unfortunately, the strip search didn’t happen. It was a shame since I’d purchased a new set of brontosaurus y-fronts for the occasion. After a few forms and hoo-ha, I found myself sitting in an even hotter, airless room in front of an old Windows computer.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” said my reflection in the black screen while the exam was loading. “You’re not fucking Neo. You barely know any Russian and that black hoodie is covered in cat hairs. You don’t belong here.”

He was right about everything. But once again I’d gone too deep down another rabbit hole. I was making $35 a month from my writing and the cat food bill was $135 a month. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t ready to sell my schlong for medical science, especially if they paid by weight. The cost of living was going up rapidly. There was no space in this new society for a writer who lived on cheap coffee and falafel and spent his days producing art.

Elvis has truly left the building.

“So shut the fuck up and pass this exam,” I said out loud.

The first question came on the screen.

You are an IT technician tasked with assigning various WAPs around an office building with a type 4 configuration. It’s 7.15 in the morning, and you had a McMuffin for breakfast and didn’t buy any Mylanta. Drag and drop each WAP to its most effective point in the diagram based on its port-swapping capability and on the ATP routing of each of the various function points.

I stared at the question and read it three times.

“What the fuck is this?” I said out loud. I looked around the room to see if anyone else was getting choked out by the first question, but no one else was in the room. I was flying solo. “There must be some kind of mistake,” I said again. “I don’t remember any of this from the study.” I flipped to the next question, promising to come back later.

Question 2: You are assisting a user who is telling you that their smartphone is heating up and that they are unable to use any of their apps. Upon opening the phone, you check the ERG setting and notice that it’s set to the default phase 2.2B and that the auto-update function says the PCP version of the phone is 13.8.6 Angel dust. What is the most appropriate first action to take to fix the user’s phone:

a) Chop off your own cock

b) Chop off the user’s cock

c) Shoot yourself

d) Quit your job?

I was angry. I’d paid money for the 140-hour course that had led to this point. And the exam itself on this shitty computer in this shitting hot room had cost me $400. And it seemed that I still knew absolutely fucking nothing. Again, I looked around the room at nobody saying things like,

“What the fuck is happening?” and “There must be some kind of mistake.”

But nobody answered.

“How did you end up here?” said my tiny, long, thin reflection in the metal stand that the monitor was on. “This isn’t you, Frank. You’re a creative. You see, you’re too fucking dumb for this shit. You always end up down these damn marmot holes where you stop writing your books and fancy yourself as some character that you’ve seen in movies or on television.”

He was right about that.

I studied writing because of that scene in Love Actually where the Portuguese housekeeper takes the paperweight off Colin Firth’s shitty novel and they end up in the cold water together discussing eels and shrinking winkies in various languages. I studied accounting because I watched that Ben Affleck film where he does someone’s books and then shoots them with completely the wrong weapon for the job. I studied cooking because I watched The Five-Year Engagement where Jason Segel is a top chef who ends up fucking a co-worker in the deli he works at because he moved to Michigan so his wife could do an internship and get molested by Spike, that weird Welsh guy from Notting Hill.

But yeah, I saw Mr Robot, and after going to town on the horrific writing and jarring, nonsensical second season, I decided to learn Russian and become a hacker. And my brother-in-law, Charles, told me CompTIA A+ was the entry-level helpdesk certification. And I was patient. I had time. It’s not like I was eighty years old. I’m only turning fifty this year. I’m a young sprite, a soft baby carrot, a fresh loaf of sourdough. I’m a —

“Time is ticking, Frank,” said my long metal reflection. This was the entry-level certification, and I couldn’t even get it. How was I supposed to become a great hacker like, well, like — what are some great hackers? That’s a problem, isn’t it? When you do something, aren’t you supposed to have great heroes that you can look up to and emulate?

What the fuck was I doing there?

I pushed on.

Thankfully, the questions got easier. And as the young Asian lady handed me my results, I felt nothing whatsoever.

I’d gotten 77%, and the pass mark was 70%.

I never enjoyed getting low marks on exams, and to me, it was a low mark. I resigned myself to keep it quiet since this was fourth on my 2026 most embarrassing moments, just behind when I got the work van stuck in the McDonald’s drive-thru. I got back in the lift and four versions of me stared at me.

“It only gets harder from here, Frank,” said reflection #2.

“Yes, it only gets harder,” said reflection #4. “You don’t have to do this. You could become a corn farmer. You’ve seen Interstellar a few times.”

He was right. I’ve seen Interstellar a few times. Corn farming is the future.

The doors creaked open at the ground and I stepped out.

Core 1 was done. I breathed in the cool winter oxygen.

I opened my mobile phone and tapped in the search bar:

CompTIA A+ Core 2 Training course

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