Thousands of law students across the country are approaching benzodiazepene overdose right now because the software several states' bar exams like to use, known as ExamSoft, screwed the pooch.

When I was a young person taking the bar exam, you wrote by hand. The youngs of today are more fortunate, and are allowed to use computers. The gist of how it works is that, while breaking out in hives, bar students type their essays into the software at the bar exam, and then are to go home and upload their answers to the site by an appointed hour. But ExamSoft didn't have the capacity to accept all those uploads at once. Most people were apparently met with a screen that told them to try, try again. Except that those tries never yielded any result but this:

While the IT staff at ExamSoft continues to freak the fuck out, many states have extended their bar exam deadlines. The thwarted masses took to social media last night to express their anxious agony.

I sympathize: The bar exam has a way of feeling like a referendum on your soul, because all your life you have been good at taking exams, it is the only thing many law students seem totally certain of.

Here is some succor: it would be better for the vast majority of you to never become lawyers. Bar examiners know this! Trust me, one of the first things they will present you with once you have passed is your heightened chances of alcohol and drug addiction. A precious few of you may have meaningful, intellectually challenging careers ahead of you, largely because you're not really going to practice anyway.

Almost all others are doomed to a fate not unlike that of coal-mining Appalachian teenagers in the 1950s, toiling in dimly lit conference rooms pushing essentially meaningless stacks of paper around. Concealing the meaning is part of the game, so that later, nameless and faceless corporations can return to said stacks of documents and pay you more to fight over what those stacks of documents actually say.

And that's assuming you are actually employed in a bad market.

In short, you should consider this a possible escape hatch through which you might jump, if you at all can manage it.

[Image via Shutterstock.]