Training

So I'm on shore leave for the time being, and spent today at a jolly corporate training facility (whose meeting rooms are named after irritating neo-fascist corporate goals such as 'Achievement' and 'Triumph') to learn about a global mandatory framework rollout.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but it's not such a bad course (although one of the facilitators keeps saying 'pacific' instead of 'specific', and I got into trouble for asking what or who an 'insights breakout' is), although a quick bit of mental arithmetic indicates that the grad trainee sitting on the same table as me was born in 1984. Jesus.

Anyway, part of the course inevitably involves one of those jolly corporate videos with jingling music, containing a mixture of stock corporate shots (people walking purposefully across office reception areas, groups of staff representing each colour, creed and religion under the sun chatting animatedly around a laptop - you've all seen it), senior people looking like rabbits caught in headlights saying important things badly, and a hand-picked selection of young, good looking junior staff mouthing platitudes about how fantastic everything is.

The problem is that said youngsters are all too obviously reading off a card held up behind (and slightly to the left of) the camera (the Managing Partner is almost certainly holding their family hostage to ensure they co-operate), rather in the style of those occasional and unfortunate POWs who are paraded on a tinpot dictatorship's TV screens, very unconvincingly telling the world that they've got it all wrong and the war should stop...


Just discovered facebook by the way. Having spent 10 minutes leafing through pages and pages of pimply youths who will graduate from Harvard in 2012, I suddenly feel very very old.

Carpe Diem friends, because sic transit gloria mundi