“That’s a pretty quite silence”

As I type this out, I am sitting in a training room with 15 other lucky people in a training class lead by someone that shouldn’t be allowed to mold our brains. To his credit, this gentleman knows the application extremely well and has obviously coded some of the modules himself. The problem is translating that knowledge to a bunch of people who only care about the buttons they need to push to get the job done. They don’t care how the algorithm works and why it’s awesome that the function looks through 5 different tables and uses a decision tree to derive the correct value and the surely don’t need to know how each branch of the decision tree works. He may be very good at speaking to the content one on one but when he gets up in front of an audience, all his oratory skills go out the window.

My favorite so far has been staring at the floor or a piece of paper while explaining how a function works. My eyes even traveled to the floor to see what he was looking at in hopes that I would discover what held his attention. Even his white board skills are amazing to behold. I am not one to complain about penmanship (The Great Spaghetti Monster knows that mine is worse than most) but please don’t write something important on the white board then proceed to cover it up with circles and arrows and state "You should remember this" then erase it.

So far my only glimmer of enjoyment has been the myriad of quotable oddness that emanates from this orator.

“That’s a pretty quite silence”

- Ummm ….yes…yes it is quite.

“Demand Sub Type not to be confused with Demand Sub Type, although it does create part of the Demand Sub Type.”

- Wait, what?

“I keep trying to throw you into the bus under the train.”

- Ah, the fabled mixed metaphor. The really rare ones are those that take a few minutes before you realize what was said and by then it is tool late, your brain has to play catch up the rest of the day while you try and untangle the mess of images that the phrase has conjured up.

“It’s an open book…it’s unvalidated…it’s SAP….it’s validated but,…let me show you”

- I love to watch this happen, if you look close you can see his brain shut off while the mouth is still going.

“I can hit the delete key and I can whack off…er, I can whack off that record right there.”
- He realized what he said half way through his sentence and attempted to recover then just gave up and finished the statement and tried to move on without drawing attention to himself.

I still have 3 more days of training left….

~Bibliotender