MindlessChatter

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 ...

A song starts with a familiar intro; you start to bob your head and a smile creeps onto your face. Maybe you start your special dance moves that you normally reserve for this song. Your excitement builds as the opening lyrics present themselves on the tip of your tongue and you prepare to belt them out while launching into your rhythmic gyrations; oops….you started singing a bit to early, the words start on the next down beat…wait for it….you take a deep breath, prepared to finish off the entire first verse with one breath in sync with your masterful hip thrusts. Then it happens; these aren’t the lyrics you remember; you’ve been duped; this is completely different song that samples the music of your favorite song. “What the fuck is this?” you scream as your body is thrown off rhythm temporarily. Your body automagically adjusts to your default dance moves while your brain furiously attempts to process what went wrong. This happened to our Father this weekend during a wedding reception...