I took some mandatory new hire training today which contained two gems:
1) A screen that said “Please press the BACK button to continue with this cell”
2) A session narrated by someone who sounded like an Irish soccer hooligan. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Tag: training
Craigslist N00b
Tomorrow I’m leaving on a road trip so today was a cluster of prep work. I cleaned my camera lenses, laid out the pills that Max would need to take in my absence and baked a few things for my future hosts. I was loading audiobooks onto my iPod when I checked Craigslist on a lark for the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens I’ve been lusting after. and there was one 90 minutes north in New Jersey. Just close enough that I could go there grab it and be back before dinner. I dashed off an email including my phone number and received a call from the seller in under a minute.
Him: Hello, is this Terry?
Me: Yes. I am interested in the 24-70mm, T2i body, and 77mm Hoya filter. I’ll give you $1100 for everything.
Him: Ok, would you like to get together some time during the week?
Me: I need this today. I will leave now and be in your area in 90 minutes.
Him: Oh uh, that sounds good. Um, I’m new to this. How do you pay me?
Me: Well, if I were underhanded I’d ask to pay you in check. If I were honest, I’d pay in cash.
Him: How are you paying?
Me: Cash.
Finishing Woodbadge
I set aside today to finish my woodbadge ticket as it is due tomorrow right before midnight. My ticket items revolved around the merit badge program in Scouting and improving Scouts’ access to these tools. You can see my efforts at https://www.suburbanadventure.com/woodbadge-ticket/ or http://ifinishedmyticketstopaskingaboutit.com/, the second I’ll probably let go of in a year. Some notes:
- I needed to kill space on the merit badge instructor information flyer so I added a QR code that leads to the council web page. I think it looks keen and makes us look modern. All the links are also bit.ly links so I can see if they’re are used. So far: 0.
- Putting together the video references for First Aid took a stupid amount of time, for instance, I found an awesome video on dealing with strokes that breaks out into a 3 minute ad in the middle. Kids probably won’t like that. Other videos presumed the viewer was a doctor, was in an ER, or was a naturopath. I probably should have just recorded some from scratch.
- For the last CIT World requirement, I couldn’t remember that that an Ambassador lives at an embassy, which is odd as I remembered the word earlier but in that it was a long requirement and I didn’t want to re-record it, I refer to it as “the ambassador’s place”, good job, Terry.
- My ticket was approved with 10 hours to spare. I finished Eagle with 45 minutes to spare. I’m growing!
Parli Pro Training
I ran a training this evening on parliamentary procedure for Ajapeu Lodge’s executive board. Â I went over the parts of a meeting, how minutes should be taken, and finally how to pass a motion with critical rules like “don’t let anyone talk twice until everyone’s talked once”. Â These rules were quickly ignored as adults leaped on top of kids and may have found ways to interrupt themselves, but one rule stuck: for the rest of the evening, in accordance with the “courtesy to the chair” section, the lodge chief, Theo, was addressed as “madam chair”.
Max Meets the Roomba
Long ago, someone suggested to me that nature would one day rise up and crush man. He wasn’t talking about this in the sense that we’d be undone by our own destruction of the environmental balance but in a literal sense that apes, dogs, and groundhogs would begin attacking people.  Quaint but unlikely and I propose the simple counter than I’ve never met an animal that could suffer a vacuum cleaner for more than 10 seconds. I purchased a Roomba as the second robot of my birthday and training max to endure the Roomba without much barking has been, tough.  These were my steps:
- See if Max would associate his love of freshly vacuumed surfaces (no success)
- Place treats on the Roomba while off (success!)
- Place treats on the Roomba while it was beeping (success!)
- Place treats on the Roomba while it was doing lines back and forth controlled by a remote (success!)
- Place treats on the Roomba while it was running normally (barking like we were in the end times)
If I had to guess, I think Max finds the turn mechanism of the Roomba menacing or maybe he thinks the Roomba is having a seizure when it wails into the same section of the wall over and over. Either way, if there is an animal uprising, I’m confident the pseudorandomly directed casters of the blue gremlin will save me.
Hating Photography
Chemistry is such a love of mine that I could bear to make it a career. The sheer power represented by the most elegantly arranged chart in the history of humanity provides a predictive power only exceeded by celestial mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. The idea of extracting a living from that fact is somewhat romantic but the realities of industry mean that relationship was doomed. Actuarial science provides possibly better dinner party conversation and the predictive capacity but none of the power. Maybe spending time in a clock tower with a high powered rifle with a copy of the illustrative life table would do the trick but would come nowhere near the magic calculating enthalpy or creating thermite.
Anyway, I’d finished running a training session at camp when I met up with someone who took Woodbadge with me. We exchanged pleasantries on how neither of us had done much on our Woodbadge tickets when he saw the camera stand on my backpack.
Him: Do you enjoy photography?
Me: I guess. Recently I’ve been having more fun doing prints but I’ve been collecting pictures from the porch of Totem.
Him: Any luck today?
Me: Not really, there was too much snow in the way.
Him: I hate photography.
Me: Really?
Him: Yep. I hate it so much I made it a career. I saw some of the most successful people being the ones who reduced the art to monotonous checklists and I thought, “I can do that”.
Me: How has that worked out for you?
Him: I’m booked clear into 2013.
Well, then.
Over-Engineered Failure
The Troop Leadership Training Seminar was fine. A bit better than mediocre but not quite “well”. It was raining, and windy, and cold, and we were outside. To teach EDGE, a skill training method, I normally have kids learn how to dodge gunfire but was unsure with the weather if running around in the rain would be appropriate. The kids were game so I ran the session outside. The final segment involved serpentining across a field yelling “I am going to live” and then rolling across a table. At one point, one kid fell, triggering other kids to fall, creating a six kid pile-up in a puddle with a camp staff member at the bottom to which one of the kids asked me:
Kid: Did you arrange this whole training so that there’d be a pile of kids with Tyler on the bottom in a puddle in the rain?
Me: If I were able to engineer it so that I’d propose an activity that I thought we shouldn’t do, have you overrule me, then have a precise pile-up resulting in a staff member being crushed, don’t you think I’d be doing something besides Scout training?
Kid: I thought you’d say that. I’m on to you…
The Power of Pizza
The conference room was packed today. Jammed full of at least 40 people. Why? Ladder training. Well, that was the title of the lunch seminar, the power of free pizza such that everyone for one hour is mystefied by the mist-shrouded deathtrap that is the standard ladder. When I walked by the slide was something like “Never let someone borrow your ladder” as if they were loaded weapons or someone one should horde for the coming apocalypse. When I passed again, someone was passionately asking a question. Like they had a ladder question their entire life and now, finally, the confusion could end. But again, the pull of pizza was strong as everyone was glued to the screen as ladder mishaps were played and common ladder safety statistics that had been painstakingly assembled were shown. I think we should see how far people will go for free pizza.
December: Shredder Safety Training
January: Stapler Safety Training
February: Glue Stick Safety Training
March: Chair Safety Training
Train the Trainer Training notes
Boring training notes:
8:00 – Start. Already bored
8:10- falling asleep.
8:25 – ripped out hang nail. Now awake.
8:45 – inatructor says semper gumby. I laugh much louder than appropriate.
8:50 – Bored
8:55 – joke no one got.
9:00 – diatribe on the role of the district
9:15 – good presentation. Yea!
10:00 – guy with flipchart does presentation. Everyone in awe of fact that guy still uses flipchart. He points out that chart never runs out of battery and then marker dies.
10:30 – long line of characteristics of the form “is (adjective)” with the last item being “can empathize”. Is empathetic too uncommon a word?
10:45 – made “a preposition is a horrible thing to end a sentence with” joke to which everyone just nodded and said yes.
1:00 – “I love roleplaying” “no that kind”. “oh”
Love the training, hate the kids
Troop 380 had Troop Leadership Training and the Scoutmaster Josh Reass didn’t show surprising no one. The kids were a bit slow at first so I busted out the big guns: The Bugaloo song. Nothing, these kids were dead. Skip Davenport and Mike Shavel gave me a bit of an odd look as I screamed “would you like to scratch your balls!” The kids became a bit less death-enwrapped during the afternoon when we did training training. The kids quickly picked up the elements of avoiding gunfire but ran into trouble rolling over tables without exposing their head and confirming their positive outlook by yelling “I will survive” before starting to serpentine across an open field. They were getting a bit tired and I had to stop after teaching them to duck-and-dash to avoid sniper fire in case of a public shooting.  Training was downhill from here as they got restless so by the end of the day I trusted the kids neither in the troop room nor in a firefight. Completely worthless.