Late spring 1990

We were doing some preparation test for the exams of the fourth year of highschool. Since I was never such an active student in highschool, just because everything was so obligated, I had chosen a package of courses that didn't take too much of my time. German language was one of them. I never had much problems with languages, it seemed to go pretty smooth. The German language test was a vocabulary test. We had to learn about 200 pages of words. It was exactly my kind of studying. Just cramming everything in my head. Straight on stupid learning.
I don't know, but I always had a bit of an impression that I had somewhat of a photographic memory, for words, but especially for numbers. Not completely, not air tight, of course, but it always went so easy.
Usually I'd always start learning a day before the exam, but this was a bit more to do, so I started two days before the exam. I stuffed everything in my head and was worryless the day of the exam.
We got the sheet with the exam on it and I started writing away. The whole exam took me about 40 minutes, but I was stuck on one particular word that I couldn't remember. It just wouldn't pop up in my mind anymore, yet I knew precisely where it was in the book; page number and place on the page. When it seemed to me that I really wasn't going to remember what it was, I wrote down as an answer:
"I can't possibly remember this word, but you'll find the answer on page 84, third word from the bottom."

A week later we got the test returned. When the teacher returned my paper, he threw me a grin and told me in a politically correct way that I was a smartass. My grade was a 9,4 (on the Dutch scale of 1-10) and I had four mistakes. The word that I couldn't remember and where I had put the page number of the book earned me still half a point...