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Friday, 1:13 pm in Life

Yesterday I got managed to get through until roughly 10:00am before I realised that that morning I’d put on my suit… and sneakers. The calibre of the day didn’t really improve.

I arrived at my desk at the cracking early time of 8:05am, sat down, booted up Lotus Notes (don’t ask) and had a look at my calendar, only to discover that I did not, in fact, have work that day. I had training. Starting at 9:00am. So I grabbed the APC Magazine off the table and walked all the way back down the three blocks to where I parked my car, which also happens to be work’s Training Centre. The walk didn’t bother me so much – it filled in time on a crisp, clear Canberra autumn morning – but the fact that I was wearing my work clothes did. Training days are an excellent opportunity for casual clothes, and right on the back of Casual Friday and the weekend. Bah! The inanities of life!

Anyway, I hung around in the Training Centre kitchen for a while, drinking free Training Centre tea and eating free Training Centre Milk Arrowroots, reading all about Windows Vista and cryptography and VoIP in APC. Gradually more and more grads started to filter in, though mostly they were generalists. No Lawrence and no Cora; I guess they both booked into another session. Too bad, the day would’ve been much more fun otherwise; with Cora especially, since I think we’re both equally cynical (and and anti-social) and I would have had someone to commiserate with.

The subject of yesterday’s training was Workplace Communication. You know the thing; how to make small talk, don’t dominate conversations, active listening and all that. All stuff I’ve heard or seen before. All stuff I’m not particularly good at; networking. In social situations I’m either nervous, in which case I dominate conversations, or comfortable, in which case I dominate conversations. I’m hopeless at small talk; I hate the either inane or ‘prying’ nature of it. I ‘know’ it’s something I ‘need’ to work on, but that doesn’t really mean that I like the idea.

It’s like the vanishing scarf trick. When I was little I had a friend called Lucas who went through many phases. Somewhere between having great abs (we were about 10) and cake decorating, Lucas went through a magic tricks phase. He would usually explain his tricks to me if I asked, and one of his favourites was the disappearing scarf, which basically involved hiding said scarf inside a fake thumb. The ‘trick’ – as with all stage magic – was making the audience not notice. After he explained to me how he did it, it became obvious; so obvious, in fact, that when years later I saw a professional magician perform the same trick on TV it was so glaringly obvious I couldn’t understand why no-one else saw it.

The course yesterday reminded me of Lucas’ scarf. The one thing I can’t stand is falsity in interpersonal interactions; something that, unfortunately, almost our entire society seems to be built on. Every now and again I encounter various executive types in either social or work situations, and when I do I always make sure to watch how they interact with people; and it’s all scarf tricks. All the stuff we got taught yesterday about active listening and repeating back the last thing a person said to you phrased as a question, the stuff of politicians and royalty.

Am I really the only person in the world who finds this kind of thing highly offensive? Maybe it’s just that I’ve dealt with so much ‘false friendship’ in the past – people who “go along to get along” all the while stewing over what they really think about you. It’s not that I think you should be rude or abrasive in the workplace or anything, it’s just that if someone walks up to me and starts using a ‘technique’ – and, you know, you can tell – I feel like slapping them. Talk to me like a human being for godssakes; I’m not an actor in your career role-play.

But I was good for most of the day. Especially the part where we started dealing with talking to managers and executives. I guess I just kind of find it funny since most of the adults I knew as a child were, in fact, executives. Dinner parties were always full of executive chatter; staff they liked, staff they didn’t. I guess it kind of osmosed in after 22 years, and as a result I think I’m fairly good at dealing with managers and executives. Other people aren’t. Like, really really aren’t. Here are two tips:

• The first one is that executives and managers generally do not want the minutiae of your job. This becomes more and more pronounced the further the executive you are dealing with is removed from your immediate work.
• What your executives do want, on the other hand, is for you to be able to actually do your job in the first place. Even your boss has a boss, and if you can help your boss look good to his or her boss, then you will be loved.

Very simple, very powerful, very easily forgotten. We took about four hours yesterday covering that stuff, with a scaled panel of managers (our wrangler’s boss, his boss and his boss again).

All throughout the day, the training facilitator guy kept going into ‘role-play’ mode, butting in or adopting various behaviours for demonstrative purposes. It was extremely obvious yet I was amazed by the amount of people who would get frustrated or yell “It’s not fair!”

We had this one exercise where we were split into four groups, given an envelope per group and told “May the best team win!” The envelopes were full of a bunch of different cut-up map pieces from different maps. On the front of every envelope, scribbled in obtuse biro was a place; ‘San Francisco Bay Area’ or ‘Western Australian Wildflowers’ or whatever. After a brief period of scrabbling, people worked out that we had to share map fragments between groups. We had the SanFran envelope, so we went around to the other groups, looked at their envelopes and swapped them them map pieces they needed for their SanFran map bits. Soon everyone had their map pieces assembled (ours only had five parts; lawlz). However, during this time one of the girls had gotten the shits with the exercise and asked the facilitator for further instructions; this, incidentally, was what we had to do in the first place (the point of the exercise), and eventually she clapped her hands and announced to the group that she had written up a list of things we were supposed to find on our maps. My group had to find some bay, which we did; so I reported this info to the guy, who kept adding extra ‘bits’ onto it. How far is it from the city? That’s not where the city is, the city is here. Are you sure that’s two miles? And that sort of thing; I just played along. I mean, it’s a roleplaying game; a simulation. But I kept having to calm people in my group down who were getting hysterical; “You can’t change the rules after the game has started!” Che-ee-el, Wi-ii-inston.

By the end of the day I was becoming less co-operative (especially after one game which I sat out of because I thought it was inherently sexist¹), even managed to sideline the facilitator by getting into a debate with another grad over whether we thought he was approaching us from a position of wanting to relate to us personally or just wanting to get his job done. I, in case you couldn’t have guessed, took up the latter position. I’m not outrageous enough to think I ‘beat’ him or hurt his feelings or whatever, but I suppose I was inadvertently showing the downside to playing these kinds of corporate games; lack of trust.

People can tell when you’re playing confidence games.

And now it’s lunchtime. And then back to that monster of an Access database…

1. As a public servant, if we ever find ourselves in an area that we feel we cannot work in because of ethical or moral objections we are always told that the best thing for us to do is to request a move. We’re supposed to provide impartial advice; if we can’t do that, we need to remove ourselves. ^

• Tags » life, work
• Comments By » ~H [h]
• Mood » thoughtful