Training Day

[Yeah, let’s be open about this: I don’t mind the music of the Kaiser Chiefs. Not their big album either, the ones after that. I don’t see what the fuck it’s got to do with you if I think Everything Is Average Nowadays* is a tune.]

My philosophy on everything is pretty much: it would probably be pretty good if it wasn’t for people ruining it. Obviously this doesn’t include stuff that is just about people being evil already: being a child killer is a flawed concept in its very nature, it would be wrong to claim that child murdering is a great concept ruined by people.

Today I was on training day with work: these are definitely flawed at their base level and when you factor in people, let alone some of the people who work for my employer. What I’m saying is I got bored a bit today by poor presenting but more often angry in ‘breakout’ discussion groups because I was forced to work with fucking mentalists. Well not work, but speak with them: which is ten times worse.

[Nigel Pivarro is not a great actor is he? And by that I am saying I would probably cast some of my socks in any role above him. I know that is deemed like something too harsh to say about someone trying but…well he’s fucking rubbish.]

At one point a woman was clearly just talking so she was talking and the room had to listen to her. The presenter said she needed to move on unless anyone had any more questions. There was that bit of silence where everyone is looking around thinking ‘I hope no-one else says anything because I want my lunch’ and this woman just started saying random, incoherent nonsense. The only intelligible stuff was that she was speaking because she felt someone had needed to be speaking, and that someone should be her – even if she had nothing to say.

Later on a different woman when asked to talk about the strengths of someone just listed what she thought the weaknesses were. I sat there listening, thinking that someone was going to point out that not only was she talking shit but she was also not even trying to do what she was supposed to be doing. At one point she was questioning why Microsoft were involved in something to do with computer software. Apple were the bigger software company she said…most people just nodded along. Well, she was speaking loudly with confidence and, amazingly, that will be sufficient to impress most people.

I am not most people. I am like a sheriff or something. A sheriff of people talking shit. So I raised my hand to get the attention of the woman loosely chairing the discussion (I say loosely as if she’d been doing a good job we wouldn’t have been listening to this imbecile describe why the report we were looking at wasn’t effective and wouldn’t achieve its intended goal, despite the fact that it had already been made abundantly clear it was a real report for something that had achieved everything it needed to do.) and she asked me what I had to say. I just pointed out that we were not doing what we were asked, that we were wasting time listening to this woman talk utter spurious nonsense – I did explain clearly and concisely why she was wrong using daft things like facts – and that if we concentrated on a quick discussion about what we were supposed to be discussing, we might not look like complete fuckbolts when we were asked to relay to the room what we has discussed (“Microsoft seem an odd company to be in a relationship with regarding computer programming”).

I felt quite proud of myself. I had struck a blow for common sense and intelligence and,most significantly of all, not being a fucking loud mouth dipshit. And then the woman started talking again, ignoring anything I had said and talking more of the same shit.

*I do like the song and I am not averse to the sentiment but I do hate it when this specific phrase is used. Everything, or at least the majority of things, is average. That’s why it’s average; that’s what average is, a representation of the norm. The sentiment of things being uninspiring and mediocre is what people are getting at…the irony of it being sang by a band 10 years too late for Britpop on their way down from a summer of popularity is not lost on me.

Test Go?

I sometimes get a bit frustrated at people being a bit slow on the self-service machines in your supermarkets. You know them – you serve yourself. You scan the things yourself and do the payment bit yourself. It’s self-service. Because it can get quite complicated – passing a product over a scanning machine – some people can often take three or four hours to scan and pay for some toothpaste and some margarine.

Mostly it is people being frigcrowaves, but sometimes it is other people being frigcrowaves. Look at the labels on this machine. That is where you put the money (cash notes money) IN. IN. So above it there is a big, red label saying NOTES OUT with a smaller arrow pointing to where the notes come out, which is not there – that is where you put the notes in. You know that is where you put the notes in because underneath, slightly further away than the NOTES OUT label for the slot nowhere near it, is a label saying NOTES in. Can you see it? The word in is partially obscured by some yellow and white masking tape.

Maybe, Tesco, that is why your profits have not risen for the first time in 20 years. (But, yeah, they have still maintained massive profits, just the level of profit has not risen. Response? Spend millions on lots of schemes to arrest the slide and not just accept that maybe the recession double-dipping might mean people are spending slightly less on Tesco brand shotguns and the like.