Five Days: My ARE Story (set to the sounds of Donna Summer)
Rod Henmi
Licensed 1982

In a place far, far away a long, long time ago, I took the ARE. It was the era of disco and we actually used our hands to draw. It was an incredibly difficult procedure: expensive, exhausting and inconvenient. The full exam was held only once a year. It took five days and the powers in charge of Missouri, my resident state at the time, made the clever decision to hold the exam halfway between the two biggest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, so that almost everybody was required to drive at least two hours and spend four nights in a cheesy motel. The exam required you to take a week off from work and sit for days straight in a windowless, airless Ramada Inn ballroom. The design exam was twelve hours long and since you were only provided with a table and some blank sheets of paper, people brought drawing boards with mounted “Maylines” (aka parallel bar), boxes of tools, coolers with drinks and sandwiches, lamps and a few even brought drafting stools. Continue reading →