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October 25, 2005

Cat Herding

The part of my job that I like the least is training groups of people. I prefer the nearly-lone tasks of installing, configuring and troubleshooting and developing system management software.

For some reason, though, our clients prefer me over others in my group when it comes to training. Why, I'm not sure. Perhaps because I'm a woman and my personality is a bit warmer than my male cohorts'. I don't know.

As you know, John and I have a large herd of cats - 8 head, to be exact.
I swear, my eight kitties listen better and behave better than the 5 Unix system admins I attempted to train today.

Aside from the loud-mouthed eater mentioned below, I had a manager wander in with a video of his kids that he had to show everyone on his laptop. Nice guy, but I was in the middle of walking them through using the application.

And then, hungry girl, a nice girl, but extremely clueless when it comes to interacting with people on a professional basis, was grumpy because we were running a little late while waiting on another sys admin type.

So she asked someone for a book or a magazine -because she was bored and didn't want to waste her time.

Someone actually handed her one.

I was dumbfounded.

When I once again started the class, she glared at me because I was disturbing her reading.

Don't get me wrong - everyone there is nice, they just need lessons on how to behave in public.

Maybe Emily Post should be required reading for all college students before they graduate from college.

Perhaps that will give them some kind of clue as to proper behaviour when one's employer is paying me the big bucks to teach them something.

But, probably not.

Anyone remember Emily Post?

Anyone?

Posted by Beth at October 25, 2005 04:36 PM