if you want them to care about zombies, throw in George Clooney

On Thursday, the last day of the class I was teaching, my customer wanted to work through a "real world" scenario to make sure they understood everything they learned in the class, since they'll have to do it in real life.

Normally I use a missile example when I do a workshop. A missile has been fired at a friendly ship, and the missile on the friendly ship has to intercept and destroy it before it hits. However, given the current climate here, where the locals aren't feeling too friendly towards the US because of all of the stuff going on, especially with Israel (full disclosure - I'm on their side), I decided it was best to make up a scenario.

Also, the scenario had to be entertaining. These guys lose focus quicker than a 4 year old with ADD. So I came up with this: we were from a country called Kanukistan, going to an island called Arlandia that, because of a scientist's experiment gone wrong, had recently been taken over by zombies. Worse, a few of the zombies stole a navy boat that had a missile. We had to destroy the zombies to get to the island and save the scientist.


While a few of the officers seemed vaguely interested in my scenario, one of them said "who cares about the scientist? why should we rescue him?" Everyone in the class agreed. Granted, this was after 4 days of intense 10 hour training days. The last day is always the worst because everyone is tired.


"Well," I said. "I forgot to mention something. George Clooney is on the island. He went there on vacation." The officers were now paying attention again. "If we don't finish this exercise by 2:30, he's going to be turned into a zombie." I drew this picture, prompting one of my students to comment "it's a good thing you decided to be an engineer and not an artist".

That, for some reason, was a good reason to work on the project. For the rest of the day, until 430 actually, we worked on the exercise. Which was kind of funny because people were saying things like "would the zombies have a missile with more capabilities than ours?" At one point the photog who took our pictures came in to thank us again (and to buy us lunch again). He asked what exactly we were doing since we were talking about missiles and zombies and had the above picture taped in a prominent place on the wall over some marketing poster.

One of the officers explained we had to save George Clooney by 2:30 otherwise he would turn into a zombie and that some zombies had commandeered a ship with a missile that they were going to fire at us. The photog looked at me and said "Um, what class is this that you're teaching?"

Here's what the picture looked like after we modeled it. Notice the blood coming out of the zombies' mouths. That was added by one of the officers. I am saddened to report that we didn't say George Clooney by 230, but the exercise finally finished up by 430 and I was able to meet my customer for happy hour.

And I'm going to bet that none of those officers will forget taking a class with me.