Horses for Courses

If there is anyone out there that does read this blog on a regular basis, firstly thank you, secondly if are you a young nubile female who is free of any communicable diseases mail me and thirdly apologies for not posting anything in the last week, contrary to popular rumour I have not been locked up in the loony bin I have been on a course (which quite frankly isn’t too far removed from being locked up in the loony bin).
I am of two minds about offsite training courses, on the one hand they mean that I am away from the office for a week and am provided with a nice hot lunch everyday which is a good thing but on the other hand it means battling to stay awake through hours and hours of material so dry it makes the Sahara look like the lake district! In the good old days we used to be able to book a swanky hotel and expense the curry and beer evenings that make being away from home worthwhile. Now of course that has changed, the ‘approved’ hotel we are forced to frequent isn’t a hotel at all,not really. Hotels have receptions, bars,staff that speak passable English and beds that aren’t made of concrete, this place has an automated lobby (no seriously…its like something off Red Dwarf, and not in a good way), no facilities at all and if you happen to accidentally bump into one of the ex Stasi staff members they are likely to strangle you with your own leg and steal your wallet. Transfer the inmates of Pentonville to this place and they’d riot until they were return to their usual standards of comfort and opulence.
As for food, in the good old days of yore we used to be able to pretty much eat and drink what we wanted and expense it, as long as we didn’t totally take the piss you would be ok (the only time I can think of someone having their expenses challenged was when one of my more rockstar colleagues put in an expense claim for 20 margaritas from a strip club in Soho – true!) Now we are strictly controlled and if you spend more than your allocated £20 a day a massive concrete (cheap materials you see) accountant is dropped on you from somewhere in the rarefied heights of management and woe betide anyone who has more than a small glass of house wine showing on their receipt……we have a pillory in the car park for those miscreants!
Anyway I digress, courses……. courses are made or broken by two factors, the other students and the teacher (they don’t call them that, its generally the ‘facilitator’ or the ‘tutor’ or something equally wooly), if you have never been on this kind of course you might be thinking that the content of the course might have a bearing on how bearable it is, you’d be wrong! One of the universal constants of business training courses is that they are interminably boring, always! The other universal constant that can be applied to any course, anywhere, anytime is that atleast one of your fellow classmates will be an argumentative, opinionated twat who even if his (its always a him) life depended on it wouldn’t be able to resist interrupting at every opportunity and recounting long, dull and ultimately irrelevant anecdotes for your delectation.
Incidentally the only way I have found to counter this particular ilk of fool is simple, very effective and terminally childish. All you have to do is write ‘KNOB’ on a post it note or similar and every time they start to speak wave it about……..try it, you’ll see, not only will you amuse all your fellow ‘delegates’ (well those with a sense of humour anyway) but you might find that the constant sniggering and guffawing might make them think about opening their stupid cake hole next time round.
Course Teachers come in two types (well three but as far as I am concerned the third is just a myth) one can be summed up nicely by the old saying ‘those than can do, those that can’t teach’ the other is your nearing retirement ‘I think I’ll work part time doing something easy’ type, they can be useful as long as they atleast pretend to care if you are paying attention or not. The third category by the way, is your power dressing bisexual with short skirt, hair in bunches, body to die for who seems to want to give you extra tuition in the evenings accompanied by her aerobics instructor friend who has a proclivity for root vegetables (see told you they were a myth!)
Whilst on a course, especially in the latter stages it is essential to guard against one of the most unpleasant feelings known to man (that doesn’t involve hamsters, toilet roll tubes and swarfiga) I am of course referring to that sense of impending doom that usually follows a large lunch and maybe a pint or two…..the nodding donkey……..that totally helplessness that paralyses you and seems to alter the gravitational force applied to your eyelids making them heavier than lead and ensuring that every time they close your heard lurches forward uncontrollably until you manage to regain consciousness, hopefully in time to stop it smashing into your desk……but not always.
I might paint a bleak picture but that wasn’t my intention at all, if you get the chance you should always go for training, after all someone, somewhere, someday will get that third type of trainer and it would have been all worth it, as long as you don’t get the root vegetable used on you that is!