every six hours your teacher will broadcast updates about which zones are becoming danger zones.

Imagine the above filled with thousands of identical desks and chairs, with only a few gray-haired procters slowly walking up and down the aisles, ostensibly to help you but really to make sure you aren't sneaking glances at your neighbor.  Your seat in the sea of your peers, most of whom you've never seen before because it's not just your gigantic lecture class taking your final today, it's a hundred other classes too, and they've scattered you like God shaking salt and pepper on the Great Hall of the Royal Exhibition Building.  You've already deposited your bags in what looks like portable trailer-classrooms made of tin, and you've already been waiting with your thousand peers at the bottom of the steps outside the REB, waiting for the man on the microphone to tell you it's time to come in - you've already rushed, or run, through the maze of seats that don't at first look like they've been arranged in logical order at all.  You've already been warned that you are not to get up except to use the toilet during the exam, and you are to put your identification card on the desk so your identification number can be checked against a roster, and you are not to write for the fifteen minute reading period, presumably under penalty of failure (death).  The student exam support group has been selling bottles of Mount Franklin spring water outside, but you're tough, and you don't need that crap - besides, who has time to drink in a three-essay-in-two-hour exam?  You see that other kids have brought pens and pencils and erasers and highlighters in clear sandwich bags, and you realize that you have actually lost one of your two pens.  You know your assigned seat number, but you find no one you recognize, not until the gigantic black and white clock at the front of the room strikes 4:15, the procters run down the aisles picking up exams as soon as the deep, unclear voice on the P.A. system booms, "pencils down", ripping them away from students whose grades are teetering on the brink of that last verbose sentence full of technical nouns they haven't defined and passive verbs, and then suddenly you realize that the people taking the carpal tunnel-inducing test with you were humans after all.

And here I am writing about how the hard-line approach is ineffective, polarizing, and in general, of the sucking state.  In every single essay.  This time I think my luck could change.  Pull me out of the aircrash.  I don't have time for the head of state.  Kill me with love.  It was a glorious day.