In-Training

On the list of occasional workplace chores that HR departments and managerial teams feel the need to inflict upon their employees surely the two worse offenders are the team-building day (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and those buy-in training courses that confine you to an anodyne hotel conference room with people you probably don’t like for two or three days at a time. I loathe them with a passion. One must be strive for civility while thinking all sorts of uncivil thoughts about the others in the room, especially the “characters”. Oh, there are always the characters; the “Big Talkers”: I am man, hear me roar! If I have to watch two more middle-aged, middle-management wannabes shaking their cocks at each other to see who can dominate the boardroom arena I will quite possibly move into the castration business. Puffed-chest poltroons parading their wares before mewling harridans from elsewhere on the managerial food-chain. I wouldn’t mind if you could get a decent meal out of these places but it is the typical fare: rubber-chicken smothered in a brown paste or a feeble green salad visibly wilting as you eat (why would you serve food reeking with garlic to ten people confined to a space barely big enough to swing an oxygen mask in?). When I was a child I was the non-conformist rebel at the back of the class who asked all the wrong questions and scoffed at the social self-compartmentalisation of others. It seems as an adult I am still that same person, only now with jets on (or to use the description of a former teacher, “Aren’t you the cynical wee shite!“)

All of which is by way of an explanation for my occasional absences over the last few weeks (and onward). I’m off now to wrap myself in a geen belt while chewing on a fishbone from a smorgasbord of lean six sigma…