It’s been four or so months since I last wrote anything on here. Since then, Facebook has stopped allowing the import of blog entries to Notes so the odds of anyone actually reading this now are far less than it was at one time. Regardless, it’s almost 12:30 in the morning and I have to go to work tomorrow but can’t sleep.
Having learned my lessons about blogging about my job, I none the less am going to go on a bit of a rant without getting into specifics. Thusly, it allows me to vent without getting myself, nor anyone else, into trouble.
Today, I had a bad day. I don’t know if anyone else at my work noticed, but it was a bad day. If I did my job right, hopefully very few people noticed how truly awful of a day I had. But it doesn’t change the fact that in six years of working in that building, I truly feel like today was the worst.
This week I’m giving training. Of all the things I do in my job, giving training is the one I enjoy the most. I enjoy it so much that I could actually do it full time if given the right opportunity and the right money. But since my job is more of a technical nature, I don’t get the chance to give training as much as I used to. So when the chance comes up, I jump at it because not only do I enjoy so much, it happens to be something I am extremely good at.
I’m not one to talk myself up, but I know that this is a skill I am really good at as I have heard it said to me over and over again. It’s one of the things I just know I am good at and happen to love doing. Despite being good at something, and really enjoying something, we all have days where it just feels like no matter what you do, nothing is going right. It’s kind of been like that this week with my training. I had put a lot of time and effort into building the right type of training environment to try and reduce any “technical difficulties” but it seems that despite that, I encountered far more than I wanted to see. And it wasn’t just in the technical areas that trouble surfaced.
Even the best teacher can struggle to give a good training class when the tools provided are not adequate enough to provide a quality training session. The last time I did this particular type of training, I was using a different, how best to describe it while being vague at the same time, “toolbox”. Let’s just say that for this class, I’m using a toolbox which has all the tools and materials for building a kitchen table. The toolbox I had the last time worked very well. All the tools were there, batteries were charged, and seemed relatively new. The “drill” got stuck a few times, but it always worked exactly as it was supposed to after banging on it a little bit. In general, that toolbox worked really good but it wasn’t a toolbox we owned. It was one we were sort of borrowing.
This time around, I’m using a different toolbox. A custom made toolbox specific for the type of job I’m training folks on. The toolbox has basically the same tools but made by a different company. This time around, the drill I got to use is made specifically for the exact job I am doing, unlike the previous drill. You would think that this would make it a better tool. When the drill works, it works fantastic. FAR better than the one from the old toolbox. But when it doesn’t work, there’s no manual to tell me why it stopped working, there’s no display or lights or anything on the drill to tell me there’s a problem. It just doesn’t drill anything. I stand there, scratching my head, trying to understand why this doesn’t work. I flip a bunch of switches, turn some knobs, maybe even unplug the drill and plug it back in again and pray that a combination of all of this somehow fixes the issue. Today, somehow I did manage to get everyone’s drill to work, but now I’m looking at the rest of my week and wondering if the drill, and anything else from the toolbox, is going to give me the same problem.
So as you can imagine, when trying to use this toolbox and the main tool doesn’t work, and you have no idea why, nor any real good means to troubleshoot it, it becomes increasingly difficult to try and teach your students how to use it. When you have a fairly large class of students, and more than half of them are experiencing all similar issues, it’s really difficult to try and move the class forward and continue on with building the table. Everyone wants to learn and see how to build the table, but when the tools don’t work the way you want them to, or need them to, the difficulty increases exponentially.
To add fuel to the fire, some of the folks who came to the table building class don’t really know anything about the tools, the table, or even how to hold a drill. Nice people, but from what I can see, they are not the best folks for trying to learn how to build this table with this set of tools. Also add to the fact that after a couple of days of training where most of the class has half the table built, they’ve only drilled a couple of holes in one piece of wood. It concerns me greatly that these students may not get their table completed by the end of the training. In most cases, students who don’t wish to do the work, I really could care less about. That might sound a bit harsh, but the reality is that if you are paying to be in a class for a specific reason, and you choose to do other things other than what you’re being trained on, I’m not going to give you much sympathy about “not understanding” anything. However, these specific students are new to the world of table building and need to learn how. I am eager to teach, but not eager to overuse my time on things they should be paying attention to.
With the toolbox not working as it is supposed to, and some of the students drifting off doing wood sculptures instead of building tables, it made my day today quite miserable. I came home, I hung out with the kids and the wife, and at one point I could feel the stress throughout my whole body. My hands were shaking and I was just SO pissed about my day. I asked Tamara to put the kids to bed. I came into my office, and literally just read emails, chatting on gTalk a bit, downloaded some stuff, and then rejoined sanity inside. I think at that point I was fine. But then when I went to bed, I laid there wide awake thinking about tomorrow. To solve that, half a pill of Zopiclone and I’ll be out shortly. I can feel the effects now so this post will end shortly.
In summary, I had a mother-frakkin horrible day. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow but I also know that I only have two days left and this will be done. I’m going to get up tomorrow, start a new day, and convince myself that it will be FAR better than today (since this was the worst in 6 years I think) and MAKE my day better.
Oh, and as I guess I should add this is that for 1) I didn’t actually have a toolbox and drill issues. It’s a metaphor. and 2) The above post reflects my own personal opinion of my rather crappy day and situation and in no way implies a view or opinion of my employer.
Now that this is all done, I can go to bed.
