Your Humble Blogger has used this Tohu Bohu before as a recipient for whinging about training sessions, and y’all were wicked sympathetic. So let me just vent for a moment…
See… see… I’m just saying. If a training session is moved on the day before it is scheduled to take place, and if the training session is specifically for part-time workers who may not have been around the day before, and if the new location is in a basement computer lab… would it kill the people in charge to put a fucking sign on the door that says Training Session? I mean, just so some of us know we’ve come to the right place at last? Or even to write something like Training on the whiteboard at the front of the room, so if we do poke our heads in, we have some signal that this is where the training will be?
And—see, I know this is utterly unreasonable, but I really prefer it when the people doing the training introduce themselves at the beginning of the session, so we know who the fuck they are. It’s not that I want to be their best friend forever, but it is just barely possible that I will have a relevant question later, isn’t it?
And finally, and I would like to say that this last bit is in no way the fault of the poor saps who were saddled with training us, if an organization switches its part-time employees to a timeclock system where we must clock in at the beginning of our shifts and clock out at the end of them, doesn’t it seem like a bad idea to have, every pay period, a process that the employee must go through after clocking out? Perhaps I’m just cranky, but seems to me that after I have clocked out, I’m not getting paid, and if I’m not getting paid, then I ain’t working. I mean, it’s only a couple of minutes—unless there’s something hinky going on, in which case of course it’s more than a couple of minutes, and of course for those of us that are locking up at the end of the day, we can’t start to shut down the computer until after we’ve clocked out so that’s another couple of minutes. And, frankly, my preference on those days would have been to shut down the computer before doing the last walk-around, turning off lights, that sort of thing. But that’s just a preference: if my Employer wants to make it a policy that I do it in the other order and shut down the computer in the dark, that’s their right and I can’t imagine it ending badly in any way at all. But leaving that aside, just as a software design issue, shouldn’t clocking out be the end of the workday?
Really finally, one more thing: if YHB is coming back from a training session this cranky (and YHB is actually a pretty cheerful guy, tho’ you might not know it from this Tohu Bohu, and certainly some other recently-trained co-employees are crankier even than YHB) then something has gone very, very wrong with the process. This will not translate into us being perfectly trained and using the software in the most ideal of all possible ways. Not good for those people who will be dealing with us in the end, and who, presumably, are designing the training sessions in the first place.
Whew. I feel better now. Thanks for listening.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Belatedly: That does sound annoying. My sympathies.
The “do work after you clock out” thing seems like an especially unfortunate precedent to be setting.
Re the lack of introductions: I see something similar a lot at work, in very different contexts: at company meetings, various executives stand up in front of the employees and start talking. This is now handled better than it used to be, but there are still plenty of times when the assumption is that everyone in the room knows who everyone on the stage is. Often they aren’t even named; but even when they are, it’s usually first name only, and titles are almost never mentioned.
I think it’s kind of the same issue as presenters who don’t repeat questions asked from the audience (without a microphone): the people giving the presentation aren’t thinking from the point of view of the audience, they’re just talking the way that they would talk with each other. I think in most such cases, it honestly just doesn’t occur to them that someone in the audience might not know who they are—not out of arrogance, just because everyone they interact with knows who they are.