The Things You Learn, Even When You Aren’t Learning

Many years ago, I took several Microsoft Office classes. The job I held at that time required that I assist medical students with Word and Powerpoint, so my boss sent me to Word, Powerpoint, and Excel (so I could help her with budgets) classes through a company called Catapult. Before that time, I had only used WordPerfect in college. This was back in the days when Macs were easy to use, and PCs were big, green-type monstrosities that required you to know DOS. I wasn’t too incompetent with computers because I used them for writing papers and emailing, but the World Wide Web barely existed then. Can you imagine such a time? (Young people everywhere exclaim, “Well, what did you DO all day at work, then?”)

I seem to remember that during the actual computer classes, I was a little bit bored. I tend to pick things up quickly, so I had to sit around and wait sometimes while the instructor helped out other people. I still learned a lot, and was grateful that my company was paying me to learn. Even though this was only my second job after college, I knew enough about employers to know that most of them, frankly, just wanted you to do your job and no more.

In my current job, we use Word to publish documents. Word isn’t the best thing to use for this, but it’s what we have, so I wanted to get some instruction on topics I wasn’t overly familiar with, like creating styles, templates, indices, and tables of contents.

I first tried looking on Amazon for books that might cover publishing in Word, but found only one book that covered the topic. This book was not carried by my library system and had no reviews, so I was unwilling to order it unless all other options were exhausted. The other books on Word seemed to be too general, so I decided to try a computer class first.

Since Catapult had long since gone out of business, I found another company called New Horizons which had a convenient location. Most of the computer training companies seemed to have the same course outlines, so I figured it didn’t matter where I took my class.

Once I’d examined the course outlines, I decided to sign up for both Word Level 2 and Level 3. I knew most of the topics in Level 2 already, but the styles, templates, and macros topics were covered in Level 2 and I thought this class would be worth taking if I could learn at least one thing new.

On Monday I showed up to class ten minutes early. The class was scheduled to begin at 8:30, which meant that I’d woken up about two hours earlier than usual. Okay, fine, three hours. Hey, if the dogs aren’t crying, they’re FINE.

At 8:30, there were only five students in the class. By 8:45, the class looked more full and the teacher began the course. At 9:00, two or three more people walked in, and I wondered whether they’d gotten confused about the starting time of the class.

Every time someone new walked in, the instructor had to stop teaching, take attendance, and hand out a course manual. At 9:30 (9:30!!!), the last two people showed up.

One of the 9:30 people was a kid. Now that I’m over thirty, anyone college-aged is a kid, and this kid was obviously a new college graduate. How did I know this? Well, first, he was not in college, because no college kid drops $275 on a Microsoft Word class that isn’t a college course. Second, he was clearly still close to college age because he looked like he had just rolled out of bed in the clothes he slept in and strolled in to class. Third, he was an hour late and didn’t seem to care. Granted, another person (this one legitimately an adult) had arrived at the same time he had, but she at least appeared embarrassed at arriving so late.

Let me tell you about an experience I had a few years ago when I was interviewing for a temporary position at a lab. The woman interviewing me had asked, “What do you think would be a good reason for you to miss a day of work?”

I was confused. Was this a trick question? “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

She said, “Well, sometimes people call in and say they don’t feel like coming in, or that they stayed up late and are too tired to come in to work. What do you think would be a reason you might miss work?”

I was horrified. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “I would only call in if I were sick, or my husband or dogs were so sick that they needed me to be there.”

“Some of our employees haven’t had a job before this,” she said.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Even during my first job in high school, I had known better than to ever offer “I don’t feel like it” as a reason for missing work. If I, with my lack of social skills and my dimly-lit personality knew this, then everyone should! And if you don’t, here’s a little tip — if you need to miss a day of work and you aren’t legitimately sick, then at least LIE to your employer!

This latecomer to class, I decided, was typical of that special breed of clueless employees, and thus clearly just out of college and in his first real job. My instinct was further reinforced when he seated himself at a computer, unwrapped a breakfast bar, and began to eat it. You know, if you’re going to show up an hour late, the least you could do is eat breakfast in your CAR on the way to class.

The first topic of the day was mail merges. Unfortunately, I had done the mother of all mail merges a few years ago when I was in charge of sending out form letters to thousands of addresses in a purchasing database. Many of the customers were international, so this mail merge required that some letters be printed on regular sized US paper and others set up on A4 paper and then emailed to the international offices to be printed and mailed. When you know how to mail merge to A4 letterhead without having A4 paper to test on, you no longer need to learn anything else about mail merging.

I knew mail merge so well, in fact, that I could have mail merged in my sleep if Chris had suddenly woken up with an urgent need to send out a Christmas newsletter the next day. (”Quick! What were your major significant accomplishments of 2006?” “Uh, I stayed in the same job the whole year?” “Good, let’s type that up, throw in some chihuahua pictures, and mail this baby right out to everyone we know!”)

While the instructor attended to the slower people in the class, I finished the exercise. I sent out some work emails while I waited for everyone to catch up, and the guy next to me also went online after he’d completed the exercise.

Meanwhile, the boy finished his breakfast and began to play what appeared to be Spider Solitaire.

Whenever the teacher walked behind him to help one of the lost people, the boy would quickly switch screens to Word. But because he’d been playing Solitaire when the teacher explained the exercise, he usually had the wrong file open and no idea what the exercise involved, so the teacher would have to walk him through it again while the rest of us waited. The boy continued to alternate between Solitaire, Word, and the internet during class.

Just before our first break, the teacher remembered she hadn’t asked the 9:30 people to introduce themselves. The rest of us had done this at the start of class, so she now asked the last two people to tell us their names, explain their level of Word proficiency, and tell her what they hoped to get out of class today.

She started with the boy.

“My name is Mike,” he muttered.

He waited.

We waited.

The teacher broke into the silence. “And what is your level of experience with Word, Mike?”

“Uh, I used it to write letters in college.”

Ah-hah!! So he WAS a recent college grad! And what kind of college did he go to that he spent most of his time on the computer writing letters, not papers?

Mike stopped talking. Apparently the list of three things the teacher had asked us to talk about were two too many for his brain to remember. He didn’t seem stupid, and yet, there was something decidedly wrong with the connections in his head. It was almost as if…he simply did not care about the class.

The teacher prodded him. “And what do you want to learn today?”

He hesitated.

“I mean, what do you hope to get out of class today?” she said.

He said slowly, “I don’t know.”

I. Don’t. Know. I DON’T KNOW?! Maybe he didn’t even know where he was. Maybe he had gotten struck by lightning on the way to class and lost his memory. Yes, surely that was the reason.

Upon further questioning from the teacher, however, Mike admitted he was there because his company had sent him. (Sadly, he didn’t mention which company he worked for, or I would have already called them and let them know how he was using their money.) Mike also was not sure why they wanted him to learn Word or what he would be using it for.

The depth of his ignorance was staggering. I wanted to believe in my lightning/amnesia story so badly, because the alternative was to accept that he simply had no interest or motivation. It’s one thing to be stupid, but entirely another to be complacently uncaring. He was, in short, the difference between Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton, but without either of their incomes.

The teacher moved on to the next person, but I didn’t hear any of their conversation because I was trying to figure out if I had heard Mike incorrectly. Maybe I was the one with amnesia, and had forgotten that Mike had said he was there to learn how to write business documents. Oooh, and maybe I was a sociopath, and had made up an entirely new speech involving “I don’t know” for Mike because I hated people so much!

After lunch, we all assembled in the classroom. There were two people who came in after class had resumed, and yes, the last one was Mike. And yes, he then proceeded to eat lunch at his computer, rattling papers and slurping bottled water while the class continued. I wanted to know what he had done during his hour-and-ten-minute lunch break that he didn’t have time to eat.

The internet connection at class had died mysteriously during lunch, which meant that I spent my free time staring blankly at the computer screen and watching the boy play Spider Solitaire.

Class ended at 3:30. At that point, we had covered only five and a half chapters of the ten chapters of the book. The three topics I was interested in were, naturally, among the four and a half chapters that we didn’t get to. I hadn’t learned one new thing. I couldn’t really blame the teacher, but I did blame the company.

If the company won’t crack down on people who arrive significantly later than the published starting time of a class, then all classes will continue to be delayed and disrupted by latecomers. If the company knows that not everyone is going to be at the same level of computer expertise, then they need to make people test into the various levels, or budget enough time so that the slowest person in the class can still complete all ten chapters. If every chapter in the book has a suggested time printed beside it, and the entire course adds up to six hours and 20 minutes (which you have calculated during one of the slow periods when the teacher is, for the eighth time, showing the same woman in class how to access the same folder we’ve been using the entire time), then budgeting six hours of class and a one hour lunch is not going to cut it.

(The company, to its credit, offered a free class to me when I told them the above.)

The teacher asked everyone to fill out a feedback survey. It might not surprise you to learn that I had a lot to say, so I was still scribbling away on the margins of my survey when Mike went to the front of the room. (Hey, if they really want your feedback, maybe they should give you more than a single four-inch long line to write on.)

As the teacher took his survey and handed him a certificate showing his completion of the course, she asked, “So did you get what you wanted out of the class?”

Mike said, “Yeah, I did.”

I translated this to mean: I didn’t have any expectations, so all of them were met. Too bad I didn’t finish my game of Solitaire, though.

I kept writing on my survey, but I was thinking about Mike.

Maybe once, back in the dot-com boom days, he would have been able to succeed without much motivation, but now he no longer had any hope of hitting it rich by getting one good idea and then slacking off for the rest of his life. So any chance he had to learn something was a chance he should make the most of, I felt. Especially if he didn’t have to pay for that chance himself.

Obviously, his motivation or lack thereof had no bearing on my life. What did I care that he was wasting a good opportunity?

Mike could have spent his entire class time playing Solitaire without any impact on me, if he had already known Word well enough to catch up quickly. He didn’t know Word well enough, so I was annoyed that his inattention delayed class and took time away from what I had paid to learn. And I was REALLY annoyed that this child, this innocent babe in the woods who I honestly hoped would get eaten by a wolf sooner rather than later, had no concept at all of what a great opportunity he had been given.

In short, I cared, even if he didn’t.

I wanted to take him aside and tell him that he had no idea what he was doing. I’ve worked for probably twenty employers already. I’ve worked at good and bad jobs with all mixes of good bosses, bad bosses, good companies, and bad companies. So I know what Mike’s throwing away.

Mike is lucky because he works for a company willing to pay to train him for a job in which he will presumbly need these skills. With all the people looking for jobs these days, companies can and often just hire the people who already have the necessary skills they want, because why waste money training someone who could leave at any time? And if Mike’s company is training him in these skills because he might need them in a different, better, position, rather than needing them in his current position, then he should count himself even luckier. Very few companies invest in their employees’ career growth. Often small companies simply can’t afford to, and frequently most companies simply don’t care to.

Even if Mike leaves this company before he gets very far, he would still have learned a skill that would have paid off at a future company. Maybe he won’t ever need to use Word, but maybe some day he’ll need more general computer skills. Or maybe he’ll need to just demonstrate his ability to learn.

Instead, he played Solitaire.

Posted by: ssjane | November 29, 2006 | 6:07 pm
Posted in: This Life