So here's my horror story.  I'll keep it short and sweet, just looking for input.  About three weeks ago I took the poly for a federal agency.  He starts off the interview asking if had taken a polygraph before and if I had done any research on the topic.  I have taken one polygraph before and passed it and explained that the only research I had done was reading everyone's horror story on another forum.  He said that is good because most people who go looking online for advice end up failing the exam.  No issues there, on to the exam. 

So we go through the entire exam twice with the second time me having to repeat the last word in the question followed by yes or no.  Twice he walks out to confer with "quality control."  The second time he returns and begins the interrogation and starts accusing me of being deceptive during a few of the more ridiculous questions.  Eventually I ask the guy if the responses he is seeing is due do what I am doing in between questions.  During the 10-20 seconds between questions I would think of irrelevant things i.e. childhood memories, lunch, my dogs, etc. and stare at the wallpaper trying to make shapes out of it, much like cloud watching.  I did this will the sole purpose of calming myself down, not to influence the outcome of the exam as he put it.  Not only did I see this as a normal reaction, but it was also advice given to me by a state agency's recruiter before taking their polygraph.  The recruiter told us not to dwell on the question or go looking for answers that would make us second guess ourselves.  So, again I see nothing wrong with what I did.  He continues to grill me and insist that I was doing it to influence the outcome of the exam.  At this point I was getting a little pissed off and was about to start arguing, but I decided that if I stood any chance at continuing I just needed to accept it and go with the flow.  So that's what I did.  He even gave me the option to write an apology to HQ for using countermeasures, which I wrote.  In the end, I bent over and, for the sake of possibly moving on, admitted what I had done and wrote the apology.  As we were walking out, he kept reiterating what a great candidate I was, that this was unfortunate, and hopefully HQ decides to give me another shot.

Obviously, I'm writing this because I didn't get another shot.  However, to this day I still feel like what I did should not be considered as a countermeasure. 

Am I blacklisted because of my admission?  Sorry for the rant, it was longer than I expected.