[Disclaimer: Please do not take the following message seriously. It's not
meant to be. But if you have any anecdotes for this topic, please post.]

Now I am quite concerned, since several experienced growers have pointed out
that I won't get certified as an rgo'er or orchid grower until I have killed
a lot of orchids. I have been trying really hard, but in my limited
experience orchids are just too hard to kill.

After one week of owning my first orchid, I dropped the blinds on the orchid
plant, it lived and was fine. For the first year I gave the first two plants
only northern light with huge trees outside the windows, that did not kill
them, and one of them rewarded me with a keiki. Another time I have knocked
over the flower stand, and several of the clay orchid pots fell from up
high, shattered into little pieces, after being repotted the orchid plants
didn't seem to have noticed that anything traumatic occurred and they
continued to flourish. I have even been very bad about fertilizing:
overfertilizing the first year, and then not fertilizing at all for a long
time -- no flowers after overfertilizing, but not fertilizing at all for
long time led to beautiful large flowers (now I am trying to be better about
fertilizing regularly though, since my goal for next year is to get one of
my mature plants to start two spikes if possible). I have snapped more Phal
spikes in these three years than I care to recall, but the usual response of
the Phal has been to just regrow a new one immediately. I have had the
humidity drop in my apartment to as low as 20% once, before I noticed, and
refilled the humidifier, the orchids were less concerned than I. Now I
haven't watered a plant for a month, and have been told that it will
probably be fine. So as you can see, the fact that I have not killed an
orchid yet, is not due to lack of trying.

How do you experts manage to kill orchids? I can't do it. I am very talented
at killing all other houseplants, cacti especially, but also some of those
plants (like dumbcane for example) that are supposed to be nearly impossible
to kill. I can kill them in almost no time at all. But I have never killed
an orchid yet, and if I have to kill a hundred before being taken seriously
by experts, I will need to learn from you experts how it can be done.

Joanna