Stop the world, I wanna get off...

Sometimes you know before you walk in the door at work it's gonna be a loooonnnggg day. It was one of those days.

Our "customer" (Verizon) has offices in our facilities and watches our every move. Well, yesterday afternoon something developed that they weren't happy with, so they *snap* their fingers and say "fix this". Anytime they snap their fingers, we jump though hoops to "please the customer". Well fixing this problem meant hiring 110 people the next day for a new "special project". And who's the trainer? ME! The other trainer Maurice took a vacation day today. Great timing.

The temp agencies managed to get 80 people in today... and I'll spare you the rest of the details of trying to train 80 people on how to use different models of cellphones and then TEST them on what they learned. Trust me, it was a chaotic cluster ****.

And then the lights went out.

Seriously, I was about to start my 2nd class of 30 people, when all of a sudden the electricity goes out in the building. Imagine me throwing my head back and starting one of those fits of insanity laughter, like when you realize everything that could possibly go wrong IS going wrong. It was about 20 minutes until the power came back on. We're all sitting there twiddling our thumbs in a dark warehouse, and I'm telling my trainees "I promise, we DID pay the electric bill this month!" How's that for a first impression of our facilities for new hires?

My poor new training manager, who seems like a nice enough guy, was like a deer in the headlights today. He told me he trained at his last company but was never in management before... he was just applying for a tech position and they asked him to be a training manager... oh great. Sounds like he doesn't know how to be a leader. Therefore I was running around like Flight of the Bumblebees today trying to organize everything, and he was following behind me everywhere trying to keep up (I walk really fast), notepad in hand taking notes for me like he's my secretary. So it's his first week, and today he asked me "is it ALWAYS like this?" I had to say"yes"- chaos is normal. I should have a brain aneurysm some time next May.

I'm going to strangle Maurice tomorrow for not being there. And I'll be surprised if our new manager shows up. If he does he's a glutton for punishment. I obviously am.