Choosing A Timetabling Software
I was not having a particularly good day. I was exhausted, my white shirt was stained with the remains of a poorly designed protein-shake and my boss had just informed me that I would be working an extra shift at the lab this weekend. This was shaping up to be the kind of day that you would go on about to your friends for months to come, maybe even years. It was not going to be that kind of day however. I had encountered a situation that was going to set me on the road to success, or whatever the hell it was that I was looking for. It all began when I had sat down with my manager to discuss a possible practical joke that I could pull on my new colleague, Adam – the new guy who was always trying to steal the credit for all my work. Unfortunately, this was not the case. I was being sent to a seminar on the uses of scheduling software for school timetabling. All I could gather from this was that I had to sit in a lecture room for two hours listening to a man yammering on about organisational techniques and clever uses of project management software. That's what they told me anyway. I was pretty sceptical, but when you have given up hope that the day can get any worse, you don't start to question things too much.
Three hours later, I was halfway through a slideshow of a school in Sweden that had completely rid itself of timetables and was attempting to run things completely anarchically. Apparently, by changing the timetable software to allow people to swap classes at a moment's notice, this school was hoping to create a community in which there were no barriers to communication and no conflict. I was not too sure how they were going to achieve this goal, but I was determined to find out. With all of the enthusiasm of someone who had spent the last hour in an auditorium full of people, I was ready to make the most of my unpaid work experience.
"Any questions for Mr...?" I had no idea who this guy was. He had introduced himself as Theodor, but had immediately forgotten our names, so I figured that he looked Russian to me. I was not in the mood for clever repartee and chose to silence the man by clicking the 'End' button on my laptop. I was already regretting ticking the 'No' box the e-mail instructing me to fill out the feedback form, which I thought would be some kind of questionnaire or something. It turned out that this was actually a form detailing how well I had paid attention, and how much I agreed with the speaker. I had to mark the form on a scale of one to five, with five being the greatest level of agreement. I wrote 5 and shoved the form into my bag. The faces of all the other people who had attended looked so harried, I couldn't even be bothered to check what they had written. If I had any interest in this seminar, I would have gone to the University, where it was much more constructive and I wouldn't have spent the last two hours doing my homework instead. Unfortunately, I had done the whole four years of university, and in many respects I was through with higher education. I felt those two years had taught me everything I needed to know to get a good job and make a comfortable living, and I just wanted to get it over with.
"What do you do then?" I had to pose this question at least four times a day. I don't know why people were so surprised, that I didn't feel exactly the same about university as they did. I knew that a lot of people loved their degree, but I didn't. I'm not sure where the stereotype that all students love to spend time at the university comes from, but it seems to have stuck. I was sick of having to explain that I didn't have a degree and I always avoided conversations about degrees and courses into as many tight spaces as possible. People could be so persistent that I once made a fake degree and hung it on my wall to stop people asking me about it. People could be so irritating about the whole story. People thought that I had studied theoretical physics, or astronomy and had a passion for fusion - these two were personal favourites that seemed to bring people up short. I wasn't equipped to answer all of these questions, so I told people that I was a charity worker and that I was going to uni so that I could get a job in the Third World, as it sounded more interesting than going on to study a subject I didn't want to learn.
Conclusion: I do not want to spend two hours staring at a bunch of Swedish timetables and this seminar was not helping
Recommended Action: I had no idea how to make a real complaint, so I drew a little picture of a crying face
It wasn't actually a very well drawn crying face, but it did have big tear drop eyes and an open mouth.
"So, I gather that you found the weather in Sweden very hot?" The man was trying to make small talk, which I was surprised to see him attempt.