Friday night saw two landmarks.
1) I finshed my O2 training, so I am allowed to talk to real people about real problems from Monday!
2) We had our housewarming party.
The party was pretty good, it started really slowly – 5 people when I got home from work at 10pm – but it picked up nicely by the end. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t as we do live some whay away from the rest of the gang and the majority of students cannot be bothered to make the two buses to get to our house. The only disappointing thing was that a couple of mates from work flaked on me and didn’t turn up. Kudos to Dan for turning up and staying even though he didn’t know anyone! James and Mike suck!!
I was suitably drunk by the end of the evening as were most people, which is always a good sign. We also had a full house as most people stayed over.
Spent a lot of the night arguing about politics which was very grown up fo us, except the topic was socialism which is very studenty. Most people grow out of socialism when they get a job!
All in all though, a good night!
I am coming to the end of my O2 training, hence the lack of posts over the past few weeks, and we are focussing on the more difficult aspects of the job this week. Namely, IP Stream – or home access – broadband. This is the slowest of our packages and is offered to customers more than 9km from their local exchange. It is the hardest package to deal with due to the fact that BT still control their lines and not us which means a lot of faffing about. Our regular trainers can’t teach us this as they haven’t done the course themselves so we had to get a specialist in.
Her opening line was “I don’t really know anything about broadband and I am not an IP Stream expert…” and that was the start of the end!
By the end of four hours of ridiculous training, that had no logical progression, little relevance to our role and and incompetent trainer we had questioned and debated her to tears.
Now whilst I feel bad about that, it wasn’t entirely her fault – a lot of the the problems we highlighted to her had started in the previous weeks, but I didn’t feel bad about letting her know what I thought about the training and her delivery.
Yesterday, was supposed to be the second day of this two day course but she didn’t come back and we were informed that we were not going to receive any further IP Stream training before going live next week and we would have to learn on the job!