Training

I apologise for my lack of blogs of late; life has been somewhat frantic. As if my work load wasn't significant enough, I have been forced to endure two training courses which have attempted to explain to me the wonders of our new IT system at work. I realise I hide well my impatience, and that most readers of this blog would describe me as a placid, happy-go-lucky fellow who gets on with everyone, and is rarely annoyed. You will no doubt then be shocked to learn that my training course irritated me somewhat.

I accept the need to recive training on a new IT systems. It is one of life great miseries for sure, but I accept that, to tick the training box, I must be herded into an overheated room to be told why I can't use the programs I am used to and we must move to a "new, improved" version. What raises my blood pressure, however, is a “trainer” who says 26 times “this is self explainatory” and then goes on to explain something. A trainer who insists on reading every word on the screen for us...who painfully and laboriously makes us go through information which is of no interest to man or beast. I quote: “To send feedback, click on the feedback button. It's self explainatory really, but let me talk you through it. Where it says "name", put in your name……………” I could go on – he did. But I won't.

The one small pleasure I recive from suffering through this is the feedback form at the end; the opportunity to, in a few small boxes, attempt to sum up a world of dissatisfaction. It was then, with horror, that I noted that the people on either side of me had ticked all the "satisfactory" boxes on the feedback form. At one point the person next to me had actually fallen into a coma. It was touch-and-go whether he would survive, such were his boredom levels, yet he ticked "satisfactory". As we filed out, I calmly enquired as to why he had given positive feedback, whether he had indeed enjoyed the training. “Bloody terrible” he replied. SO WHY, OH WHY, SAY IT WAS GOOD?? "Well", he explained, "I’m English." Dear reader, it took all my will power not to poke his eyes out with my pencil. I guess that means I am not,after all, an English Gentlemen.

Yours,

Calmly

The Broken Man

"Well Within Herself"

Someone made the comment to me, after the hospital debacle last week, that they hoped my wife is now “well within herself”।

I am not one taken to rants about the ridiculousness of the English language and those who use it, but I really would like to know who else she would be well in, if not herself.

If she is feeling well within my next door neighbour, I feel I would be reasonable to raise a couple of questions – concerns even, about what she is doing inside my neighbour.

This expression goes with a number of other terms I find somewhat frustrating; for example, “Very true”. No, my friend, it is not very true. It’s true, it’s untrue, I might even allow partially true, but “very true”? No, that is an expression designed to make my ears bleed.

I mentioned this to my long suffering wife, believing that she would share in my sense of outrage at this use of the English language. Instead, she told me that she felt that I had enough things to rant about and that I don’t need anything else. Clearly my wife has mistaken me for someone else. Me? Rant? Complain? It’s not in my nature.