Training Daze

Last week at work, I spent 18 hours in a training seminar for reasons that are still unknown to me. The class took place behind closed doors in a tiny, crowded room with no windows. As luck would have it, I sat directly under a ventilation system that was incessantly blowing out cold, stagnant air. This convenience gave me the privilege of dealing with a sore throat and cough after both lectures. The whole experience was sort of like being stuck in a faulty gas chamber for 2 straight days.

Apparently, the goal of this mental boot camp was to become familiar with a new pharmaceutical database that really isn’t much different from the one that we currently use. An esteemed colleague of mine felt that attending this seminar would be a step in the right direction for our careers, telling me, “It’s just one more rung in the corporate ladder”.
Bullshit. She seems to be forgetting that we’re contractors with this company, so we’re not even on the fucking ladder to begin with. We’re basically standing on the ground trying to hold the thing steady, while the people at the top drop buckets of shit on us.

I can’t complain too much about the guy who ran the training, I have to give him a lot of credit for filibustering in front of a completely disinterested audience. Unfortunately for him and everyone else in the room, Satan’s mother was attending the seminar. I know it was Satan’s mother because when this woman walked into the room, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and all of the Catholics in the room jumped up on tables and started hissing. She sat down in the chair behind me and immediately recited Psalm 23 in reverse. I was frozen.

The lecture began, and it quickly became obvious that this woman had not had any kind of clitoral stimulation in quite some time. The instructor was scrolling through a list of presentations on the screen, looking for the introductory slide show, and just to kill the awkward silence he said, “I almost have it.”
“No you don’t, you just passed the K’s,” replied the vile shrew.

For the remainder of the seminar, this woman (who by the way looked like the first member of Whoville’s 250lbs club) proceeded to play backseat lecturer. She corrected the speaker at least 17 times per lesson, and anytime someone had a question, she would field it. ‘Field it’ is actually a polite way of putting it; she more or less swallowed people whole and spit out the undigested bones and hair in pellet form. Her condescending remarks were so nauseating that I had serious thoughts of strangling her with an Ethernet cord, then bashing her face in beyond recognition with her laptop.

As if that weren’t enough to deal with, I also had the wonderful experience of sitting next to an old Asian woman who did not understand a single word coming out of the lecturer’s mouth. Every 10 seconds she would raise her hand and say, “Hi, I have kestion.” (Yes, she said “Hi” every time she raised her hand to ask a kestion.) This woman did, however, provide the only decent form of entertainment during the 2 day torture session. Towards the end of the first day, the speaker was going through a section on something called the RIM (Regulatory Information Management) project. He went on and on about the importance of this project, but I wasn’t really paying attention because I was too busy wondering if it would be less painful for me sit through another day of this, or to stick my scrotum through a meat grinder. Suddenly, I was awoken by the woman next to me who uttered the following statement:
“Hi I have kestion. When will we begin working on RIM job?”