soapboxdiner

The Tide is High

What a fabulous day. Got up and went to work -- instructed my first Session #2: Demonstration of Macros. Didn't prep, like, at all. Well, OK, I prepped a little. Made up the agenda and syllabus, sent out the reminder to the attendees, wiped my laptop clean of all my macros recorded during the research phase, looked up the default names of some built-in commands that are either buried so deep within submenus and subfolders and subsubsubwindows that no one knows what or where they are. I guess I did THAT prep work.

But I didn't write out a whole script of what I was gonna say, or timelog any of the, "By minute 23, be done with THIS and THIS and THIS. Then spend 3.7 minutes discussing THIS. Next!" I didn't do any of THAT. I just talked, then showed, then handed the keyboard over to the students and had them do stuff too. They all loved it.

What a cool thing to see -- people getting excited (and brave) about trying something new that they can use. :) And it was doubly awesome because I wasn't the nervous wreck that forgets mid sentence what I was talking about or who needs to backtrack because I've lost my place in the book. I was just plain old natural SBD showing some folks how to do some cool stuff. Sooo nice.

Today was also Day One: Operation New-Hire Training. We have 6 (or was it 7?) new employees starting in the next two weeks, and I'm the girl that trains them all, and QCs them all, and counsels them all, and outfits them all with equipment and knowledge.

Simultaneously.

So, Day One. People are so funny. So they do their first order, and they've JUST been introduced to the job so they're understandably imperfect because they haven't mastered what they're doing. OK. Here, let me give you feedback to help. First thing, and this one's easy now: Use commas to offset direct addresses. For example: OK, (comma) Bob. Yes, (comma) ma'am.

So I give the gal her feedback, in writing, with examples and email it off. Her response?

Thanks SBD. <-- No comma!

Argh!

Le sigh. Our children isn't learning their grammar anymore, darlings.

But anyways.

And I leave you now with one final, beautiful (though wordy) thought written in 360 BCE, darlings.

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

Symposium, Plato

8:28 pm - 08.13.09
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