Awesome training

 

I don't train new staff at the library that often.

First we have to be hiring new people, which our weirdly half-functional system only rarely has been able to do over these last several years.

Next, the training needs to happen at my library, which, admittedly, it usually does.

Third, that training needs to coincide neatly with my hours.

Finally, the trainee needs to fall, either by accident or by managerial shift of responsibilities, to my watch, and I need to take an interest.

But once it all lines up together and I am training someone, I am, well, I am awesome.

I know that when people self-describe as "awesome" they are usually not. And that even if someone is actually awesome, saying they're awesome takes so much luster off their awesomeness that they cease to be awesome.

So that's probably all the case here.

But however you want to settle all that in your mind, earlier this week I spent the day training someone.

We'll call him Luuk, just in case we need to name him further along in our story.

Luuk (it happened already!) had already had one full day of training, worked in a bookstore, and was reasonably bright, so, as a trainer I was already halfway home. We started out on the great big automatic material handling machine that I feel so strongly about and that I've mentioned so many times before in this space. I asked Luuk if he had specifically been trained on this machine.

He had, for an hour his first day. I found out who had trained him.

Uh-oh.

"Luuk," I said sadly. "This will be like when you break a bone, and they reset it incorrectly, so they have to break the bone again to do it right."