Be What You're Like

Do you ever feel that you're doomed to miss your calling in life because your basic nature is fundamentally in contradiction to the things you're good at?

For example, I've often felt that my aptitude in the man department makes me a prime candidate for the convent; yet I'm not religious. It's sort of a shame really.

Today I had so much fun conducting my training class that I was wondering if I could make it as a professional speaker. But there's just no way: feel-good corporate motivational tripe makes me want to yarf. I could never pull it off with a straight face.

The only problem really with being a great opera singer is that it's a lot of work, and you often have to sing Verdi, which I really don't like very much - not to mention ear-splitting new works by such internationally renowned fruit bats as Phillip Glass.

I'd be a famous writer, but...

I do get to conduct another training session tomorrow. I wish you could come sit in. I could try being extra-perky and saying "absolutely" a lot. Maybe I'll make a motivational speaker one day after all.

No Wonder I Have Swine Flu!

Cops, no offense to any who might be eyeing my car's expired registration sticker or noticing that I'm riding my bike on the sidewalk downtown, are pricks.

Complete, utter, lost-to-all-hope, straight-up, down-low, doughnut-scarfing, power-hungry, small-minded, pig-brained, sexists, the lot of them (with the sole exception of those who aren't). Um, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I spent the day today in emergency management systems training, and another full day of the same awaits me tomorrow. Various different state agencies are in my class. Most of them are members (probably not very large ones) of law enforcement groups.

These people are good at their jobs, and their jobs are needed; I don't mean to imply otherwise. It's just that the kind of person to whom this sort of job appeals just so happens to be a complete asshole.

My work, during emergency management operations, has nothing to do with saving lives or making the world a materially better place. All I do is disseminate information about what those big boys are actually accomplishing: I reassure the public that emergency operations are safely in hand, tell them the number to call to find their elderly relatives, or where they might find a hotel that won't turn them away with their dog, or a good resource for getting emergency prescriptions filled if they've left home without paperwork. Really, when you get down to it, it's "fluff" work - though I tend to think of it as fairly noble, when you consider I used to be in marketing.

I don't like being looked down upon, though, it pisses me off. Today in class, we had to brainstorm several different "real-life" emergency scenarios. The others at my table, cops and professional emergency management officials, actually have dealt with this sort of situation before, whereas it's all fairly hypothetical to me. We're all supposed to participate in class, but my silly, hesitant, ignorant suggestions were summarily shot down with a great deal of condescension by the heavy-necked thug next to me - who obviously considered me little more than a fluffy little travel industry bunny.

He was armed, but I bet a stiletto heel would have put him out of commission fairly quickly, if I'd been so inclined. The element of surprise, you know. No one expects to get stabbed by the fluffy bunny!

Especially if I lure them into a false sense of security first by offering doughnuts.

Get in the Car. Now.

If you really need to see somebody that badly, just go there.

This was not the intended message of the "How to conduct meetings via video teleconference" class I was in today, a class I've been enrolled in for the better part of a year. The panicmonger signed my former lead worker and me up for it. The idea was that we could use the most cutting-edge technology available to train our satellite offices on maintaining our database - a mainframe application that was implemented in 1995.

The software is gradually gaining in acceptance among older employees, which is kind of a pity, seeing as how it's been hopelessly obsolete for several years.

Nonetheless, the class was fairly instructive, once the teachers figured out how to get the equipment working. The first section of the course covered the multitude of reasons why you should conduct meetings via video teleconference. You don't have to travel anywhere, for one. And the face-to-face experience is just as real using our equipment as it is in person! Assuming that the person you're meeting with has a habit of breaking down into pixels without warning, and really enjoys doing the robot.

This isn't intended as a slam on video conferencing in general. A big part of the problem is that our equipment is (surprise!) a little bit out of date. The main camera, mounted on the back wall, comes with a tracking collar that the presenter can wear so that the camera can follow him as he walks around the room.

"Never use this," stressed the instructors repeatedly.

Why not? It sounds cool enough. But there are several good reasons (and I am not making these up, these are the actual reasons they gave):

1. You have to move very, very, very, very slowly, and not have long hair, or the camera won't be able to track you, and your conference might freeze up.
2. Your conference will freeze up after an hour or so anyway.
3. The tracking collar must be charged up before each use, but you have to watch it carefully while you are charging it, and remove it from the base as soon as the light comes on, because it doesn't shut itself off when the charge is complete and will be destroyed; and it can't be replaced because
4. the manufacturer no longer makes it, and although you can find a replacement on eBay,
5. eBay is not a state-contracted vendor.
6. Also, you'll probably forget and wear it to the bathroom.

Still, for the general purpose of a stationary, wall-mounted camera, it does fine, and the only difficulty we had was that our remote instructor couldn't demonstrate it properly because it broke when she tried to turn it on. "Hmm. Smells like smoke," she said, using the smaller, supplemental camera. "Here's the part you shouldn't touch!" She pointed to the power button.

The most entertaining part of any course is the universal frustration that students experience when dealing with unfamiliar equipment. Have you ever noticed how huffy people get? It never fails. "Here, hold down the 2 button for a little longe -" "I AM!!!!!!!!!"

And of course it always turns out they were doing it wrong.

Here are a few actual student questions from today's session.

"How slowly do you have to move to use the tracking collar? Would you show us?"

"Does the gray remote go with the gray monitor and the black remote go with the black monitor?"

"Which way do you turn the volume knob to make it louder?"

Me, I'm spending the rest of August on the road.

Honest Feedback

Boo for interminably long, completely unnecessary training sessions.

Hooray for training evaluation forms!

1. Was this training helpful to you?
No. The information presented in this class was so incredibly basic and self-explanatory that anyone who answers "yes" should be fired on the spot. In fact, I'd be tempted to believe that's the whole idea behind this, and that this whole training process is merely a clever device for weeding out some of the more egregious morons who work here, except that (a) I still see so many of them continuing to roam the halls, and (b) the manager who came up with this program is the biggest one.

2. Would you recommend this training to others?
I wouldn't really bother speaking to anyone who might benefit from this training, as such a person probably couldn't communicate much beyond pointing and grunting. Moreover, since you idiots require this class in order for us to be granted access to a basic software tool we need to do our jobs, it's not like anyone has any choice in the matter anyway.

3. What can we do to improve?
Well, you could fire your entire departmental staff and start over from scratch. I believe if you check behind the dumpster at the Wendy's down the street, you'll find several significantly better-qualified candidates. They smell nicer than a few of you, too.

4. Which topics in this class should be covered in greater depth?
I really didn't feel there was adequate time devoted to explaining the techniques we need to understand in order to wipe our own butts. Perhaps you could write detailed instructions and post them on the inside doors of the restroom stalls. Just be sure not to use any big words (see answer to question 2).

Oh wait, I forgot: you guys don't know any big words.

Additional comments:
You all owe me an hour and a half of my life back - an hour and a half I could have used for something marginally more productive, such as performing my job duties, or reading an article on advances in dredging technology, or picking my nose. Never again will I be as hopeful and idealistic as I was 90 minutes ago. You can pay me at my normal rate; you can pay me overtime; you could even offer me hazard pay. But you can never restore my innocent faith in the basic concept of human intelligence.

Okay, so that's what I would have liked to write. Unfortunately, the training staff used the new software we were covering in the class to generate the survey form, so it didn't work.