I’m writing this blog post while pretending to be writing something else. I’m at a training course and I think the woman at the front doing the talking is very flattered and impressed that I am furiously typing notes about what she’s saying. She may also be quite taken aback by my furious note taking because she may be aware of the fact that what she’s saying is a load of bollix. In some respects though, I am making notes about what she’s saying because I’ve just made the observation that what she’s saying is “a load of bollix”. I’ve also made a reference to what seems to be the whole premise of her talk for the last ten minutes which is about the importance of being “110 % pacific”.
I’m confused. She wants me to represent more of the pacific than the pacific itself? But not just me, she wants everyone in the room to be 10 % more pacific than the pacific itself. Has she any idea what she’s asking us
To do? Firstly, she’s completely disregarded the makeup of our human bodies. To turn flesh, blood and bone into ocean is no small feat. Secondly, if we somehow did manage to make ourselves more pacific than the pacific itself then what about the wider provocations? Such a mutation would undoubtedly cause terrible damage to our planet: earthquakes and tsunamies galore”. I doubt many of us would survive such an ordeal; not that any of the pacific people would enjoy this form of survival anyway, knowing that we’d destroyed our friends and family and billions of other people just because of one errant, maverick woman’s baffling instructions at a team leaders’ training course.
When this training course first started it seemed fairly prosaic. Firstly, we played a game where we had to associate each day of the week with a certain temperature and colour. You could try playing this game at home if you like, although you may not get the full impact of the game because we were privileged to have a properly qualified teacher – sorry, learning facilitator (they’re not teachers apparently; they don’t teach us, they just facilitate our learning. At least they’re honest about the fact that they don’t actually teach us anything.) I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of the game was meant to be, unless it literally was simply to make me aware that my colleague Phill associates Monday with a dark grey -10 degrees Celsius, as opposed to Fridays’ golden 25 degrees Celsius.
We’re making people redundant left right and centre: policemen, army staff, council workers; massive household businesses are going bust, yet in spite of all this we can still find enough money to employ none-teachers to facilitate the learning of the tenets of team leading by playing a game where we associate days of the week with temperatures and colours?!
The learning facilitator has just announced that she’s handing out feedback forms so that we can give our opinion about the training day. Maybe I should write this blog post on the form. Of course, I won’t; I’m far too nice – or coward is – to do that. Besides, she’s quite attractive in an odd sort of way and I don’t want to scupper my chances of getting with her. I’ve been making little jockey comments all through the training course in a bid to impress her, but I don’t think she’s noticed. She doesn’t seem to register them as jocular comments, treating them as if I’m saying something serious, taking the comment literally and then making a basic remark in her cooing, patronising, bored voice.
There’s something about that voice though that intrigues me. She can’t sound that bored all the time? She’s fairly young, in her early thirties. She must get excited sometimes. Maybe I can excite her. She sounds so bored that during one of my many drifting off moments I started wondering about how excited she might sound during sex. Is that odd? Of course it is, I didn’t need to ask. I wonder if she’d still sound bored or if she might perk up a bit. I could do some role-play with her. We could sit in a room (that we pretend is a classroom) as she goes through her tedious, nonsensical training garbage in her bored voice. As time goes on I seduce her with saucy quips that relate to what she’s saying in the training. At first, she treats me with indifference and keeps going with her talk, but in time her voice begins to get a bit more excited as she becomes increasingly aroused. I continue to taunt her with more saucy witticisms as she attempts to focus on the material of the training course and revert back to the bored voice. But it’s no use. She can’t help herself. She eventually gives in to temptation and … Shit! I’m writing this on her feedback form!
What the heck? I’ve just come back to the reality of the situation to hear the bored-voiced woman telling us that we must be “110 % reliable. Hang on, does that make sense? We have to be 110 % pacific and 110 % reliable? I’m now 220 % confused; we can’t be both; that’s mathematically impossible. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m on a course that’s just a bit too advanced for people like me with my primitive mathematical assertions and my inability to listen to the learning facilitator without fantasising about having sex with her.
Could this possibly be my most worrying (and perhaps most telling) blog post of them all?
If you’re still not bored of reading rants about training courses then
check out a previous post on the issue.
There isn’t any sexual content in that one so you can relax.
