idle training

The reason I haven't written anything this week is I've been taking a 2 hour class every day after work. It's so I can get ITIL certified. The class costs about $1200 in the US, but my customer is letting me take it with them for free.

Well, you get what you pay for. Here's how the evening typically goes. The class is supposed to start at 5:15, meaning I should be in a taxi, on my way home, by 7:15.

But the conference room where the training is, which can barely fit all of us students, is never open at 5:15. So we wait. I normally put my laptop on the copier outside the conference room and try to weed through my emails. Even though I don't have internet connection at the training site I can at least get the mails ready to send when I get back to my hotel.

By 5:45 the room is usually free. Then hurdle #2. Out here time is more of a suggestion than a reality. Half the students still will not be there even though training is now starting 30 minutes later than planned. We wait another 15 minutes for them to show up.

By 6 the class starts. But then Ahmed, the tea boy, sometimes forgets to order our dinner. The class is stopped while he is tracked down and told to get us food. The students then protest they can't look at one more training slide until they are fed.

By 7:30 I've already completed my exam. I've started passing the answers sneakily around the class to speed up the exam review. One student in particular will take 5 minutes to guess the answer to his question. He always seems to pick the wrong answer, and there are 5 choices, so we have to sit through him selecting 4 wrong answers before selecting the right one. On Wednesday I suggested to him that he pick what he thinks is the wrong answer and maybe he'll get a test question right. He smiled, but I wasn't joking.

By 8:00, if I'm lucky, class breaks up. Then I stand outside on Khalige Al Arabi street and hope an empty taxi comes by. I normally wait about 15 minutes, sometimes more. I let a student give me a ride back to my hotel the first night of class, but he ended up purposely driving the long way so we could "chat". I was stressing out because I had a conference call and now have decided that rides from students take longer than waiting for a taxi.

Every night this week I had a conference call. Around 9:15 or 10, depending on how long my call goes, I start to think about dinner, decide I'm too tired, and then I go to bed. I haven't even had a chance to work out a single night this week.

Training ends next Wednesday and I take my exam. After all of this, I better get that stupid certification.