Come and see the violence inherent in the system... Help, Help! I'm being repressed!

I've come to the conclusion that I need to go fishing. The reason I say that is that I just spent the majority of the morning smashing my head against the proverbial brick wall trying to get crap to display using session variables. The story goes like this ... (wavy going back in time cliche inserted here):

Back in week one of the diploma, we were given a lesson on "Session Variables". Unfortunately, I didn't start classes until week three, so I missed out on the collective wisdom that our resident programming guru, Rachael, had imparted to the class. (See Jake, that's how you suck up, not like your lame effort last week mate). Anywhooo, I managed to fudge my way through based on the worksheet that I printed up from Google Doc's, but for some reason I couldn't get anything to display -this was after I spent about an hour sorting out errors in my code.

So, I mucked around with the code behind file and eventually, I was able to get something to display. Success right? WRONG! I was displaying the selected index properties of the drop down lists, and not the selected item properties. Well, I mustn't have known the correct way to phrase the question when searching for the solution in my books or on Google, because adding .SelectedItem to any of my code just threw up errors.

Anyway, just before I got to the stage where my robes were rent asunder, and I covered myself with sack cloth and ashes, I discovered that I wasn't putting .Text after .SelectedItem in my global declarations.

When I was 18, I penned two phrases, which I put up on my bedroom wall:

• If you want to run my life, pay my bills!
• People are basically morons!

The second of those has never rung truer than it did today.