expect the unexpected

This has been a rather strange week. And I'm glad it is over.

The weather has been weird. The last weather report I saw before going to bed Tuesday night predicted lower 40's with a chance of rain and periods of strong wind. Wednesday morning after shoving my MP3 headphones into my ears I opened the door to a dusty snowfall. It was really eerie, kind of like the snowfall that bathed LA at the end of Crash. As I walked, the wind picked up and began to blow the snow sideways. The odd thing is the temperature never dipped below the freezing mark, so it was a wet sticky snow. By the time I got home from work the news meteorologists were reporting a winter storm advisory "going into effect sometime earlier today and lasting until any minute now."

My class is weird. Other than the sophomoric outbursts, frustrations and amusements, and homicidal temptations, they really are a great group. However I can not say the same for the curriculum I'm supposed to be teaching. The last seven weeks have been pure chaos for me and the other trainer that launched the department. There were supposed to be two final tests, one taken at the beginning of the fifth week and the other at the end of the seventh. Today is the end of week seven and the second final did not appear in our curriculum until three days ago. I was so excited to give it to my class so that we can be done and over with every thing. But to my dismay, I opened the link to final number two and... it was a carbon copy of the first final test. Out of fifty questions, only TWO were different. I called the guy who writes all of our curriculum and let him know what was going on. He said it would be fixed in a couple days; meanwhile my class was originally slated to graduate in a couple of days. Yesterday I got an e-mail saying that the final was not supposed to be on day 21 but should have been on day 35, the error has been fixed. Great, my class took the final two weeks ago, been working really hard to study for the second final that they were told was coming; now there is no second test. So, I just gave it to them again. Hopefully they do better. The other trainer and I both have protested the quality of the final, (it doesn't have much that pertains to our department's normal activity) so the guy that wrote our curriculum asked if we would rewrite it for future classes. Heck yeah, I'm down with that.

Since our classes are the first classes to use the curriculum, the students are ending up as guinea pigs. They haven't particularly appreciated that status, but they have managed to survive. Well, most of them have. On their first call, instead of saying "this call will be recorded and monitored for blah blah blah" one of my agents said "this call will be recorded and modified..." Another agent had a bit of a Freudian slip and inverted the 's' and 'k' in welcome disk, thankfully the customer did not notice.

The class graduates Tuesday. After that I'm not sure if I'm going back to my old department, staying in this one, or doing something completely unexpected. Whatever it is, I'm sure it will be good.