Wednesday June 22nd, 2022

The exercise:

Write about: learning.

Put on a brief training session for our Community Services department this afternoon on the program we use to put the Board agendas together. My replacement was there as well but she's not quite ready to be doing those on her own.

It went well and I felt pretty comfortable doing it. Certainly not something I could have pictured myself not completely freaking out about ahead of time back in high school or even university.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Well done! Your next task is to provide a brief training session to a hostile audience who think your training is going to cost some of them their jobs... ;-)
What did you enjoy most about it, then?

Learning
The Maestro listened to the tale of the Auditors, what they'd definitely stolen from the Museum, what they were likely to be after, why they thought the Staff of Five Elements was the key to all this, and the description of the visit to the Halls of Sunset with an impressive silence. Fabian, who did most of the talking, kept pausing where he expected the Maestro to interrupt and so kept having to restart without quite knowing what he was going to say next. Rystin looked a little puzzled by his seeming disfluency, whereas Dread looked as though he could barely keep from laughing.
"Worrying," said the Maestro after Fabian had come to a halt having run out of things that he and Dread had agreed would be revealed. They were holding back on what they knew about Sebastian Framer and what they thought he'd done so far in order to let the Maestro tell them what he knew without being prejudiced. "I remember the Halls of Sunset; we used to visit there regularly enough when they were ours. Before the Auditors took over I suppose."
"Before the Day of No Sun," said Rystin. Fabian felt just a tiny bit annoyed; he and Dread had also agreed not to bring that up to see if the Maestro had any insights that they'd missed.
"True enough," said the Maestro. He sounded contemplative, but his eyes were as bright as ever and his gaze kept flicking between the other three people in the room. "There was no exhibit like what you're describing in there when I was last there. And that was two days after the Halls were closed to the public."
Fabian felt goosebumps raise on his arms. "You're sure?" he said, without thinking.
"Naturally," said the Maestro. It was still a snarl, but it was moderate by the Maestro's standards. "I'm not so old that my memory is failing, you know!"
Dread came to Fabian's rescue. "So the Auditors, probably, set up that exhibit after the Halls were closed. Is it likely they were intending to have it ready for a reopening?"
The Maestro sat back in his seat and only just avoided preening. "It's hard to know," he said eventually, just before Fabian was about to fill the silence himself. "There weren't so many of them back then. There were a handful; maybe six or eight? They added more, in quite a hurry too, and then they closed off all applications to their department. So... I can't even think why they'd be setting up their own exhibits."
"History?" asked Rystin. Fabian smiled at him, grateful that someone else had suggested it.
"They don't seem very interested in that," said the Maestro. "Our big objection to them taking over the Halls of Sunset was that they had no idea how to curate anything, or the relative values of things in historico-cultural terms."
"Do you want to see the exhibit?" asked Fabian. Dread nudged him with an elbow; they'd agree earlier to offer this but only if the Maestro seemed to be heading that way anyway. Fabian realised that he was a bit early by the terms of their agreement, but he ignored Dread's elbow and smiled as sincerely as he could manage. "Maybe seeing it could help you guess at their motives."
The Maestro considered this, leaning forward, elbows on the desk and head in his hands. "You've already been in there," he said after a good thirty seconds. "So... I guess another trip wouldn't hurt. The four of us?"
"Well," said Dread, smiling at the Maestro. "About that...."

Marc said...

Greg - hah, that sounds like... a nope. :)

Honestly? Just feeling confident in my ability to explain the program and the process and having enough knowledge and experience to answer all the questions they had.

Hmm, the Maestro seems to be taking this all in stride well enough. I wonder how the next reveal will go?