What doesn’t kill you makes you…smarter?

Today has been a weird day. It started when I woke up this morning and wasn’t sure what day it was. See, I think I only got about two hours of sleep last night because when the weather turns cold, as it has recently done in Chicago, my insomnia kicks up and I can’t fall asleep to save my life. So thinking it was Thursday I left for work thirty minutes later than I should have, realized it halfway to work, got stopped by a giant freight train, considered turning around and just going home, but balled up and went into work anyway.

So you can imagine how the rest of my day has been. Aside from the splitting sinus headache I pretty much feel like I might just pass out from exhaustion in my cubicle. So to combat my sleepiness and inability to concentrate on anything for longer that five minutes, I decided the best use of my time would be to take an IQ test. (Right there you should be able to realize that my state of mind wasn’t in the right place…)

So I Google “Free IQ Test” and choose the first one and start working through the questions, following the directions and not using a pencil, paper, or calculator. I had a flashback to college where when we were bored we would sometimes take IQ tests and make fun of the “smart” kids who scored lower. (One kid on my floor actually bragged about having an IQ of 84, which according to most sources is below average. And the sad thing was that he was an education major.)

When I am done taking the test I click the “submit” button and enter my e-mail address and sit back and wait for the score. Now all throughout college I was pretty much a 127-128 whenever I took IQ tests. I was in some gifted classes when I was younger but never considered myself “a brain”.

So imagine my surprise when I received the following e-mail:

Dear TheOfficeScribe,

Thank you for your interest in the test at IQTest.com.

Your general IQ score is: 132

Regards,The Team at IQTest.com

Holy crap. Lack of sleep and forgetting things has actually made me smarter. I feel like I am completely qualified to write essays and lecture to students about that whole 8-hours a night thing being a myth. I can finally buy that jacket with the patches on the sleeves and smoke a pipe.

Or maybe the whole thing was a fluke and I should stop procrastinating and get back to my damn job…

~The Office Scribe