I recall with fondness my days as an ordinary examiner - assessing, awarding marks, ruminating on the errors in writing, reflecting on methods to be used to improve the situation, coming up with what one believes are  brilliant methods to train students, smiling over the errant messages from students at the end of their papers, marvelling over the skill of students in masking their answers filled with 'make no sense at all' kind of words for pages on end, being engrossed in shading the miniscule circles and rectangles in the OMR sheets, etc. 

Gone is the charm, for I realised as a Chief Examiner that life is dull - one only has to assess how examiners are assessing and gently show them the direction that their assessment should take. The rest of it is filled with signing one's name endlessly...filling in details in registers, proformas, claim forms etc. Ehew...

I believed that having signed my name a thousand times would give me a saintly aura, only to realise that one loses one's sanity and any semblance of saintliness as one goes through hundreds of papers with a microscope in hand to ensure that the good ones are not denied the marks due to them and that the cat-on-the-wall kind of students get what is not due to them...if one understands what I say. :)

All said and done, this was an experience of a different kind. Showed me that I had oodles of patience and tons of adding- up- scores skills.