AN: Something that occured to me in class today.

Searching the mess hall, John spotted Rodney sitting leaning over a table. With a grin he headed over and dropped his tray onto the table, amazed.

"Is something wrong?" John asked.

Rodney was sitting, a perfectly good lunch sitting ignored on his tray. Ignored and forgotten for a book that looked like it was more than a thousand pages in length.

"Shut up, colonel. I need to read this." Rodney shot at John without even looking away from the page. It was somewhere around the center of the monster.

"Read what?" John couldn't help but be curious. It was in his blood. The look that Rodney gave him told John clearly to get the curiousity out of his blood.

"Nothing that your vastly inferior mind would understand." Rodney replied sharply.

John stayed silent, staring at Rodney as he ate his lunch and waited for an answer. He knew he'd get one eventually. He only had to wait. Then, lo and behold...

Rodney sighed and glared at John, but it held no venom. Just exhaustion. "If you must know I'm studying for certification exams." Rodney replied.

John gave Rodney a confused look. Exams? For what? The man freqently bragged about being the smartest in two galaxies, what degree could he not have?

Rodney must have seen the confusion on John's face because he continued, placing his book down onto the table and closing the cover, leaving one finger in to mark his place. "Computer certification exams. Every few years you need to get re-certified because they're constantly changing so certain things become outdated and new things come up." Rodney explained. Radek sat down with a thick book of his own beside Rodney.

"Yes. Is very annoying when you already have job that needs constant attention." the Czech man grumbled, placing his wrapped sandwich aside to be ignored as Radek read the book he had brought to the table.

"And the fact that the SGC has finally decided to upgrade Atlantis' computers with the newest ones on the market means that a quarter of my staff need to retake the damn exams because none of us have had the time around the daily catastrophies that happen here and there's bound to be components and changes none of us have seen before." Rodney added.

"That sucks." John stated. He had hated exams in school and had been glad to be rid of them. A job where you need to keep taking them? That sounded stupid in his opinion.

"Yes. It does." Radek affirmed shortly.

"It wouldn't, however, 'suck' so much if certain people would stop talking to us so that we could get through these damn books while we have time." Rodney said, looking pointedly at John. The colonel got the hint and silently finished his food before leaving the two scientists to their books.

AN2: An explanation! I myself am in college to become an Information Systems Specialist. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's someone who fixes your computer after you break it. I figure that part of the scientist's jobs (or those who are certified to do it, anyways) on Atlantis would be to fix the expedition computers when they break. Because with a contingent of marines on base? Computers would break. Frequently. That means they'd be certified by Microsoft, or Apple, or whoever. You do indeed need to take certification exams every couple of years for the reason Rodney gave John above and when my teacher told us in class he himself was studying to update his certification the image of Rodney studying my textbook jumped into my mind and wouldn't leave. Then Radek joined him. And this story was born.

So... yeah... review?