Year 12 examination results

come out today. There is undoubtedly much nervous nail biting going on.  Parents will be watching clocks and watches until their now almost adult children can "log on" and get their results. Students will be pacing up and down and checking their digital time pieces.
I am heading off for a fasting blood test at about the same time. Waiting another few hours for breakfast usually makes me cross and scratchy - although I try not to show it. I simply don't understand how people can't eat at least something for breakfast. 
But all this is nothing compared with the trauma of waiting for examination results. 
Prior to the computer age the school results would be printed in the paper. You would hunt for your number in the seemingly endless mass of tiny print. The Senior Cat, as school principal, would sit there with a list of student numbers and frown anxiously over the list.
At  university the results would go up "on the wall". It seemed that everyone would go rushing over to get their results. My first year at law school I waited until the rush was over. I just hoped I had passed - law was strange and difficult, far more difficult than psychology or linguistics. Eventually one of the staff came into the law library and said, "I'd go and have a look if I were you." I went. It had quietened down considerably. There were only a few people around by then. 
I remember trying to focus on the list...and then heading back supposedly to do the translation I was supposed to be doing for a member of staff. What I actually did was burst into tears. It was not because I had failed but because I had done far better than merely pass - although that was all I had hoped for. The office staff made me a large mug of tea and the academic staff somehow kept wandering into the library and saying nice things to me. 
I can only hope that, at least for the students I know, someone will do the same to them - whether they have passed or failed.