Thursday, September 27, 2007

Wot I dun on my lst wekend.

I had a pretty exciting weekend last week. Firstly there was my sister in-law's wedding, where I got a free dinner and there was no dancing involved at all. The guy she married also has an Xbox 360, so we can trade games, but unlike him (so far) I have kids and so game playing is a luxury I have little time for these days. I used to be able to lock myself in my study while my wife watching boring stuff on TV and I'd game my brains out. Now if I close my study door, my daughter knocks on it going, "Daddy, daddy." Cause I'm such a softy, I open the door and she comes in and pulls stuff off shelves and generally makes such a nuisance of herself that I can't concentrate on gaming. Then I have no choice but to leave my peaceful study and assist my long suffering wife with the two hellions. But essentially the wedding was good.

The other entertaining thing we did on the weekend was go to the Royal Melbourne Show, which for any foreigners is a big, yearly agricultural gathering on the outskirts of the city with lots of carnival type rides and show bags with sugary crap and other useless junk in them. Of course there are the animal pavilions, but most people come for the exorbitant parking and entry fees and the outrageous cost of all the food and showbags (which the sellers will try to convince you is good value for money). We had some of my wife's relations with us (mine wouldn't be caught dead there these days), which was great cause it spared me from going on kiddie rides with my daughter and from carrying her around all day. It was the first time we'd been to the show with kids, so it kind of made the experience more entertaining viewing it through a child's eyes. The most awful thing I had to endure there (apart from going through a big wad of cash) was having to sit through a musical Shrek show where actors (who should be out of work) dressed up as giant Shrek characters, pranced around a stage singing and generally doing awful voice impressions of the movie characters. How kids like that kind of thing I'll never know.

So I'm expecting this weekend to be dull in comparison.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Back to basics...

I've just finished doing two weeks of training to teach me a whole lot of stuff that I already knew and is mostly irrelevant to my job. I won't bore you with the details, but essentially myself and my colleagues were told we would receive this training when we started...two years ago! It is only now that the powers that be have suddenly said, 'ok, now you have to do it.' As I could have told you before I'd done it, it was a big waste of time considering that over the two years I've been in my current job, I've kind of picked up that basic stuff we had to go through in the training.

I should also explain from the other side of the coin, the whole exercise is intended to give us an overview of what the people we will be supporting have to do, even if we don't end up doing it ourselves. I have no problem with that idea. The timing of the whole thing is what's stupid about it.

Anyway, I've finished it and let us never speak of the training again.