This month I became a chestnut, otherwise known as a first time reader for a national testing service. Although I did feel significantly nuttier by the end of the scoring session, I don’t know why they call us chestnuts.

What they should have called us was veal. We sat, refrigerated, in a large hall for a week. We were fed and watered. Even the test booklets we read were handed to us so that we didn’t have to remove our ever-flattening butts from the metal folding chairs we were stuck to.

But the hardest part of the work wasn’t the lack of exercise; it was the mind numbing process of reading practically the same essay approximately 150 times a day. For seven days.

To keep from snacking myself into oblivion, I sipped from a water bottle (placed on the floor so as not to expose the exams to its debilitating liquid). Drinking all that water made me go to the bathroom a lot, which turned out to be a good way to break up the monotony of the reading.

And even better, there was something about the bathroom that always made me laugh while I was there. Holding the lock on the stall door, a metal plate proclaimed the door to be a “Hiney Hider.” The large “H” at the start of the phrase pictured a stick figure’s head and neck above the “-“ in the “H” with little ankles and feet peeking out below.

I looked at this image and these words for a week.

And for what? Professional development? Maybe. For a $1000 plus check? Definitely.

And because I live in a world governed by Murphy’s Law, my little cash windfall has already found a place outside my wallet—at the local car repair shop in Dillon. Apparently, the catalytic converter on my car has become clogged with bad gas (kind of like me after a bean burrito).

Now, $800 later and relived of its constipated exhaust system, my car, I figure, must have  known what I had in store for it when it got its belly ache. It’s headed for the auto bone yard, the chrome cemetery, the island of misfit cars.

However, the car can’t be made into an organ donor until I’ve driven it across the country one more time to trade it in for a new car (more on that adventure later). I just can’t believe that I graded for a week to save a car from facing certain death only a month before its own Bataan Death March across the U.S.

Originally, I had earmarked that money as part of the down payment on my new car, and though I still plan on purchasing the car, I loathe having to finance the custom floor mats I ordered because my trade-in was unable to pass gas.

Again, I am forced to ask myself the question: “What am I willing to do for money?” And the answer is always the same: “Anything. I have a new car to support and an old one to bury. And the funeral costs are expensive.”