Just Give Me the Frickin' Training Manual, I'll Do It On My Own

The last two days were an exercise in frustration. The University is moving to a new financial software system which requires over 4,500 staff employees to go through several training classes. I get so frustrated with these classes because they're dumbed down to a point that I find offensive until some person in the class raises their hand and asks a really stupid question, then I understand why the classes have to be dumbed down - because stupid people are everywhere. I know that my spelling is horrible and therefore I keep the Merriam-Webster link on my favorites and I don't enter any spelling bees. When I am hired to know the travel policies, I know them. The stupid people are the ones who are hired to know something and never bother to learn it.

When you're in an all-day training session, it prevents you from doing any other work and it is also generally accepted that your usual work will not be done that day. All you have to do is sit in a training session and LISTEN. I don't know what the stupid people are focusing on but they aren't listening to the trainer and will ask a question about a topic that was JUST COVERED ONLY A SPLIT SECOND AGO!!!! All they have to do is sit and listen and they can't even do that. Argh.

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, let me go on to tell about how I turn into a rebellious teenager as soon as I enter one of these training rooms. At the beginning of the session, the sticky name tags are handed out along with a sharpie and you are instructed to write your name and pass the pen down. I passed the pen down without writing my name. No name tag for me. HA, that'll show 'em. When I first entered the room on Wednesday, one of the trainers said "You can see better in front." Really??!! Gee, I never would have imagined that. I decided to sit in the very last seat with my reason being that I am extremely far-sighted with a vision acuity of 20/5. I could probably read the board from home. From my seat in the back, I'm also able to assess the different types of people in the room.

People can be lumped into different groups, one of which is the out-of-towners; groups of 3 - 4 people from a different campus who had to start out driving at 4:00am to get here on time and are now a bit giddy, they don't ask questions, they're only looking forward to lunchtime so they can head over to Grumpy's and loosen up a bit. Then there's the Questioners; all of the stupid people can be found here, they don't ever open their email or play solitaire during the boring moments or touch their computer in any other way until instructed and even then they touch it in the wrong way, they're not familiar with the procedures, forms, names, reason for being here, etc. etc. The last group are the people who could have probably received about an hour's worth of instruction and would figure the rest out on their own, just like they always do. They can be found to put their fingers up to their temples whenever a Questioner raises a hand and they're always the first out of the door at the end of the session.

Thursday's class was led by a woman who hadn't taught that class in awhile and couldn't seem to kick it out of first gear. She kept using the phrase "Let's plow ahead in the interest of time". The only problem was that the plowing never commenced, only the mention of plowing which took up most of the time. If we had actually plowed, we would have been done by the projected time of 2:00pm, instead it dragged on to 3:00pm which made me nice and cranky for the rest of the evening.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the weekend which will include sleeping in and yard work, hopefully in the sun. Maybe I can also work on stress relieving techniques to get me through two more days of training next Monday and Tuesday. Argh.