Vacation

After barely making it to the train station and arriving with my shirt drenched in sweat, I boarded the train to start my 5 hour trip through the France countryside on my way to the Alps in southeast France.  It should be a beautiful trip and a great chance to see more of France. 

I'm looking forward to meeting up with my old friend I used to work with in Canada, despite the fact that he's British. 

I could write a complete entry on the last two days of this training course.  We had a consultant instructor hailing from LSU in Louisiana with a PHD in psychology to deliver material on 'coaching' as it is a significant part of our job role.  The only positive feedback I can offer for this guy is that he had plenty of energy.  In my 28 years have put myself in many situations that one could call wasteful.  I've spent full days laying on the floor of my apartment because laying on the couch was just too optimistic of a task to complete in a day but these 2 days were the most useless two days of my life.  As a outside consultant he would have to pride himself on being able to present topics to anyone in any company without having in depth knowledge of the company's organization or operations. 

Since his knowledge was limited on our org structure we spent the better parts of the sessions teaching him how we operate, our reporting structure and our role in the company.  The course was being held in a small room and I guess this guy was used to speaking in auditoriums or maybe even stadiums because he would get so aninmated and yell as loud as he could to make a point.  He also used the strategy of punching himself, slapping his own hands, pounding on the wall/tables for dramatic effect.  By the end of the day hands were completely red from constantly beating the shit out of himself.  The class found it funny at first but after a while
it just became annoying and frustrating.  He could tell we weren't getting involved so he continued to get more and more animated and use a louder voice to engage us.  He might do a lot of presentations for the hearing impaired.  The only joy I took in those two days was the incessant jokes resulting and humourous criticism from his presentation style.  There was no value from this part of the course, which was supposed to be the main draw for entire week.  It was a shame as the rest of the course was quite valuable.  I have to stop here on this topic before I get too negative, as awful as these two days were, without it, I would have been leaving Paris two days earlier so it's not all bad.  

As always, the fellow course-mates were top notch and we attacked paris as best we could.  I continue to add friends from around the world and I can't wait to take advantage of their friendship when I make a trip to their countries.