Thursday October 15th, 2009

The exercise:

Today's starter: required training.

I had to do one of those terribly lame required training sessions this morning at work. It was an online thing, going through various scenarios with utterly clueless 'employees' doing everything wrong, data security wise. Painful.

On the plus side, it gave me a writing prompt. Not that I particularly like what I wrote, but whatever. I'm sure you guys can do better!

Mine:

I sat there,
Flipping through the five-hundred page handbook,
And I thought,
"There's required training to be a crook?"
But I saw
The teacher had a prickly, dangerous look
So I said
Nothing and waited to see what it took
To leave there
Without being sent to The Crazy Cook,
The Knife King,
Who, I knew, had written that useless book.

4 comments:

Greg said...

That's what all of these training sessions are like though -- and there are people out there who do need to see them....
I have a Fire Warden training course coming up next month, despite me pointing out that my approach to a fire is well established: in the event of a fire, everyone on my floor will be herded into a lockable room and not allowed to leave until they pay me £50 :)

I like your poem by the way, it's actually quite nifty.

Required training

I was standing outside,
Getting wet --
Because it was raining --
So I thought I'd try
To stay dry.
"Stop it! You've not had the training
To use that umbrella,
Fella,"
The HR director was claiming.
So I ended up wet
But she ended up dead
As I used the umbrella for maiming
(For which I'd had training)

TAMmommy said...

He was leading the required training for new employee's. He hated this class, you would think people would have learned this stuff by the time they were old enough to get a job, but years of experience had proven to him, that was not the case. So he began, "Welcome new employees to your first day of required trainings, we start at the beginning and work to more and more advanced topics...today, we start with Handwashing."

g2 (la pianista irlandesa) said...

Normally she was patient with people; one shouldn't assume all were at teh exact same level of knowledge on a particular subject, she was fine with this rule of thumb. But this? This was ridiculous!
"Good morning class, welcome to Writing 101. Now, before we get started I wanted to address something that came up during class sign ups. I noticed that most of you were having difficulty with a rather archaic part of writing, so I wanted to begin class with a hefty review of full-word spelling and using a pencil and paper."
- - - - -
So that would seem to be that.

Marc said...

Greg - I very much like your fire policy :)

And your poem is fantastic.

Tam - oh man... I wish that was required training everywhere. I think a good use of technology would be to install a scan that doesn't allow people to leave the washroom without washing their hands.

But that's just me.

g2 - haha, ah the perils of technology. You know, for whatever reason, it really bothers me when people leave messages on Protag, even just between friends, using abbreviations and slang?

Yeah, I dunno. But 'hey m8 u shud rite more' gives me homicidal urges.