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Things I Dislike (#1 In An Endless Series)
You know when you attend a meeting, and get a thick handout, and then the presenter proceeds to read you the handout?
Yeah. I don’t like that very much.
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about 4 years ago
It’s worse when they have a powerpoint presentation of said handout and they read it to you from the screen.
Worse.
about 4 years ago
Hey, I think my company paid $1200 to send me to that very meeting not too long ago.
Wheee.
about 4 years ago
I like when they take a slide that was obviously a 36″x 24″ visio diagram source designed to be printed out on a plotter with about 300 little bubbles and 2500 words of obscure buzz words and techno platitudes and shrink it down onto a 800×600 power point slide – project it – then read it to you !
this is obviously just a theorical example — I wish argggghhhh……..
about 4 years ago
If they’re going to do that, it better be one awesome handout.
So… what was the handout about?
about 4 years ago
Believe me, nothing at all exciting.
about 4 years ago
Hey Scott, what’s your job title now? I thought you were supposed to be the guy making handouts, not the other way around.
about 4 years ago
IT’S NOT JOB RELATED! At least not directly. Put it this way, I hope HR doesn’t have this site on bloglines.
about 4 years ago
With some pipecleaners, paste, magic markers, and popsicle sticks (you do bring pipecleaners, paste, magic markers, and popsicle sticks to your meetings, don’t you?) a thick handout can become your own personal meeting fortress. But save a few sheets to make those triangle football thingys with which to barrage the barbarians outside your gates. Pour hot coffee on them if you must, but the fort must be held at all costs!
about 4 years ago
Almost never happens to me these days.
People who waste the time of other people who earn )or in many cases these days should be) earning ~6 figures don’t last very long.
But yes, people who do not know how to give presentations shouldn’t be. Whomever did this to you shouldn’t give another presentation until they know how to give one.
about 4 years ago
Yeah, obviously it was a corporate policy training manual. Ahh the joys of 13 pages on sexual harassment, policies, complain processes, and dispute resolutions. In the military we have to go through that bull—- every year.
I’m not sure if now that I am an officer it will be any better. As an enlisted guy they teach the class to the lowest common denominator, but as an officer I foresee much longer types of these classes.
It’s too bad that organizations like yours have to cover their asses so thoroughly in such matters.
about 4 years ago
“It\’e2\’80\’99s too bad that organizations like yours have to cover their asses so thoroughly in such matters.”
since when is inducing a coma “covering their ass”?
about 4 years ago
Well if Lum were to offer his secretary (hypothetical situation of course) a promotion in exchange for a little horizontal refreshment, the company can point to the training and said they did all they could to prevent such an act from happening. That way, when the inevitable lawsuit comes down the road, they have a valid defense.
about 4 years ago
Same goes for other matters. If Lum does something the company doesn’t approve, they can point to the training manual in the event of a wrongful termination lawsuit.
I’m sure it stated things to the effect of how many office supplies he is allowed to take for his use, how the corporate retirement policy works, sick leave / vacation policies, blahblahblah etc. etc. etc.
about 4 years ago
Had this done to me recently; it was a government-type PID, so while it wasn’t so thick, it was extremely dense reading material, and the guy presenting it immediately started to get antsy.
I’m reading page 1, paragraph 7, and thinking “I’m going to need advil every 3 pages”.
Him: Guys, skip ahead to page 9 for a moment. What does it mean here on line 19 by “user specified locations”? Is this something they want us to add?
Us: Erm? What’s it refering to.
Him: Well it says right here on page 8, it’s about Phase 4.
Us: What’s Phase 4?
Him: Turn back to page 8, it says right there.
Us: Give us a moment to figure this out.
Him: Ok.
Him: Listen before you get too far into that, can someone explain to me what they mean by “limited 3d models” here on page 3?
After an hour of this sort of torture, we’d visited “most” of the document and came away with completely incorrect conclusions and understandings.
I wonder why.
about 4 years ago
If I can’t fit the sum total of an entire meeting onto 3-5 sheets (duplexing optional) of 8.5×11 there’s more information than people need/want to read.
And yes, HR is by far the worst offender in this area. Here’s a suparsekrit: They all (mostly) get their stuff from the same place. There is a national and per-state HR organizations that share a common extranet-type site where HR directors can download prefab PPTs on just about everything as well as prefab employee handbook pages.
My HR director sent me the prefab IT policies to “check”, because we all know every organization is identical and whatnot. I replied with the 4-page document I hand-crafted instead. This saved 16 pages in the handbook and was more accurate. Not to mention it didn’t use 3 paragraphs to say “Email is our property, we can and will read it at will, don’t be a douchebag.”
about 4 years ago
Of course my grammar in said document was a fair sight better. But the gist is the same.
(edit button kplzthx)
about 4 years ago
I should find the URL but I know Pfizer changed their entire HR training policy in 2001 when they lost a law suit that proved no one paid attention or even remembered anything specific they were “trained on” due to insane boredom.
Training does not equal here’s a book read it or here fall asleep while I read the book to you.
about 4 years ago
True enough, I can’t argue that. But better training costs more. A lot of companies have done a risk analysis and determined the benefit of using cheap read-from-the-book style training outweighs the possible risk of losing a lawsuit. Then again, a lot of companies just do training like that for the simple fact that many benchmark companies do it that way.
about 4 years ago
I don’t think that was a gaming meeting. Taepodong II isn’t a sequel popular MMOG in Korea…
about 4 years ago
Maybe they need a new Bureaucracy Management department. Oh, damn it.
about 4 years ago
Echoing the “lawsuit lost due to boring training,” people will read it to you because others have lost lawsuits due to “no one reads those things.” The company’s onus becomes not just to give you the information but to make sure that you have it.
about 4 years ago
blachawk, now that you are an officer you will get to teach those classes. Hopefully you are not the junior lieutenant in your unit; you will become the sexual harrassment training officer, the eeoc training officer, etc. etc. etc.
If you think sitting through that crap was boring, having to stand there and regurgitate it is worse. Ranger school was more fun.
about 4 years ago
It was probably a presentation to help dynamically influence their big-picture view and then work out how to think globally while synergizing their bottom lines. They want to stretch the envelope and embrace customer satisfaction with an out-of-the-box and seamless living game world. They don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but this is hardball and they need to embrace the userbase 24/7, lverage that user experience, and create a scalable user experience.
I think I got the same memo…
about 4 years ago
I’m pretty sure if they embraced the userbase to enable customer satisfaction, that’d be in violation of some of the policies in that snooze-inducing document.
about 4 years ago
You’re lucky I invited you to that meeting. That meeting was chock full o’ goodness, and I don’t appreciate you putting it up on your website. You didn’t say anything about the diagrams at all. I worked hours on those things. The Player Interest vs. New Feature comparison chart was resplendant with good data that you could use. If you had logged 1 hour in that Power Point class we paid for, you would know how hard it was to synch up that Midi file with the animation.
about 4 years ago
I need to teach myself PowerPoint one of these days.
about 4 years ago
Say ‘no’ to Powerpoint and ‘yes’ to Impress by OpenOffice ;P
about 3 years ago
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