Training FOR blinking twelves, BY blinking twelves
Took babybro to the Wizards game after work. Snagged some good
seats--it's a birthday celebration, after all. The look on his face was
totally worth it. I love being kuya.
Watching Gil and the Wiz thump the Timberwolves mostly erased my office
aggro, but just so there's some sort of record, I'm going to describe
it.
The Superior Court for the District of Columbia has decreed that
henceforth (actually, since last week), all filings in civil matters
were to be electronic. To prepare us lowly support staff peons for this
change, our management prepared a series of training sessions for the
new ECF system that we were to attend or else. The first two
sessions were supposed to be quite good--a teleconference with someone
in charge of ECF, a PowerPoint presentation, and all the rest of it.
But those of us who had better things to do last week--you know, like
our jobs--passed on the first two sessions, leaving them for
people whose attorneys regularly filed papers in D.C. Superior Court.
No problem, management assured us. We'll prepare video training
sessions for you. Today was one such video training session.
I'll leave aside, for the moment, the usual rant about how
technologically-allergic many of my colleagues seem to be.
Anyway, management is not technologically allergic. They
couldn't be, since they arranged such a nice video training session for
us, right? Except that instead of actually talking to someone who knew
anything about audiovisual presentation, they went with the easy way
out: they simply pointed a camcorder at the screen during the
first (live) training session, and hit RECORD. So
where the original training session had high-quality images--which,
incidentally, were provided to us all via e-mail last week, the
video training session showed a mostly unreadable screen with heavily
distorted sound.
Since the screen was illegible, we were forced to go with the sound.
Other people were taking diligent notes, but since we had already been
provided with the PowerPoint slides, there wasn't much point--the slides
spoke for themselves. Most of us realized this, and began to drift off.
When I awoke with a start, the tape was still droning interminably on,
and most of the people in the training session were asleep.
Then, abruptly, it stopped.
The genius whose idea it was to point the camcorder at the
original screen in the first place had forgotten to plug the camcorder
into the wall at the start of this session. We had been running on
batteries which were now exhausted. It took two people to figure this
out. By this point, my soul had left my body to find something exciting
or at least productive to do, leaving me in inert anomie as someone else
called the guy who set up the training session back in. The genius
returned with the AC adaptor, but spent another ten minutes figuring out
where and how to plug the same adaptor in, and subsequently how to turn
on the camera. He managed to turn on the camera, finally, but in
"Camera" rather than "Playback" mode.
The camera, which had been hooked up to the conference room a/v stack,
briefly showed us sitting there passively before the air was rent by a
piercing shriek. Yes, the volume on the speakers was turned all the way
up, and genius pointed the camera--and thus its
microphone--right into the speakers, unleashing that beatiful
fingers-on-a-dusty-chalkboard sound of feedback.
Finally, the show was back on the road. More dozing. "Are there any
questions?" the tape asked.
I didn't stick around to find out.
seats--it's a birthday celebration, after all. The look on his face was
totally worth it. I love being kuya.
Watching Gil and the Wiz thump the Timberwolves mostly erased my office
aggro, but just so there's some sort of record, I'm going to describe
it.
The Superior Court for the District of Columbia has decreed that
henceforth (actually, since last week), all filings in civil matters
were to be electronic. To prepare us lowly support staff peons for this
change, our management prepared a series of training sessions for the
new ECF system that we were to attend or else. The first two
sessions were supposed to be quite good--a teleconference with someone
in charge of ECF, a PowerPoint presentation, and all the rest of it.
But those of us who had better things to do last week--you know, like
our jobs--passed on the first two sessions, leaving them for
people whose attorneys regularly filed papers in D.C. Superior Court.
No problem, management assured us. We'll prepare video training
sessions for you. Today was one such video training session.
I'll leave aside, for the moment, the usual rant about how
technologically-allergic many of my colleagues seem to be.
Anyway, management is not technologically allergic. They
couldn't be, since they arranged such a nice video training session for
us, right? Except that instead of actually talking to someone who knew
anything about audiovisual presentation, they went with the easy way
out: they simply pointed a camcorder at the screen during the
first (live) training session, and hit RECORD. So
where the original training session had high-quality images--which,
incidentally, were provided to us all via e-mail last week, the
video training session showed a mostly unreadable screen with heavily
distorted sound.
Since the screen was illegible, we were forced to go with the sound.
Other people were taking diligent notes, but since we had already been
provided with the PowerPoint slides, there wasn't much point--the slides
spoke for themselves. Most of us realized this, and began to drift off.
When I awoke with a start, the tape was still droning interminably on,
and most of the people in the training session were asleep.
Then, abruptly, it stopped.
The genius whose idea it was to point the camcorder at the
original screen in the first place had forgotten to plug the camcorder
into the wall at the start of this session. We had been running on
batteries which were now exhausted. It took two people to figure this
out. By this point, my soul had left my body to find something exciting
or at least productive to do, leaving me in inert anomie as someone else
called the guy who set up the training session back in. The genius
returned with the AC adaptor, but spent another ten minutes figuring out
where and how to plug the same adaptor in, and subsequently how to turn
on the camera. He managed to turn on the camera, finally, but in
"Camera" rather than "Playback" mode.
The camera, which had been hooked up to the conference room a/v stack,
briefly showed us sitting there passively before the air was rent by a
piercing shriek. Yes, the volume on the speakers was turned all the way
up, and genius pointed the camera--and thus its
microphone--right into the speakers, unleashing that beatiful
fingers-on-a-dusty-chalkboard sound of feedback.
Finally, the show was back on the road. More dozing. "Are there any
questions?" the tape asked.
I didn't stick around to find out.