In a world without manuals we must learn by oral tradition
This is good news for IT trainers like me; bad luck for you
The eye-rolling comes first. This is followed by a resigned sagging of the shoulders. Then comes a theatrical slump forward, often accompanied by an equally melodramatic groan, as each user in turn puts head on desk and covers same with arms.
And so begins a new round of user training in a new piece of media content management software.
I do admire the eye-rolling. All those whites of the eyes makes me feel as if I’m in a comedy shonen manga, soon to be surrounded by giggling, pneumatic bikini-clad girls offering to change my clothes before a party.
It’s striking when the pain comes. I have seen this drama unfold countless times at user desks, acted out like a Greek tragedy with metaphorical sobbing and gnashing of teeth. If the users happen to be standing up when I tell them they will need to be retrained in a new system, I half expect them to drop to their knees and raise their arms to the sky, howling, while a chorus of black-dressed women with white-painted faces gather round, rocking back and forth, and wailing in sympathy.
The odd thing is that this only seems to happen at the really big companies.
Everywhere else, people have to beg their bosses and HR departments to spend a little cash on their professional development. When their request is finally approved, they arrive at their training courses pretty much bouncing around like Tigger.
One of my first employers, back in my days of wage slavery, gave me a promotion without extra pay, ordered me to book myself onto a night school training course in order to gain the necessary skills, and then insisted that I pay half the fees myself out of my joke of a salary. I loved it. It was brilliant. And it was worth every penny.
Corporate-scale training, on the other hand, is regarded as a massive imposition by the recipients, even though it is offered to them entirely without charge.
I try to cheer them up by selling the benefits of learning new software systems. A new life awaits you, I claim – a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
If nothing else, I tell them, you can pick up a load of free training before ditching this joint and finding better paid employment elsewhere. Oh, there’s a stick to match that carrot, of course: if you are the type of employer who prefers to complain and kick up a fuss about the drudgery of being trained in new skills, for free, your name invariably moves higher up the redundancy notice list.
Yay, redundancy! Yay, lump-sum city! Yay, you’re out the door and onto the employment trash-heap with outdated software skills that no-one else wants!
My favourite comment from a user when informing him that I’d be training him in the software was: “Oh no, not again!” Puzzled, I asked this grizzled old geezer when he was last forced to undergo training in a new company-wide system. When he told me, I had to point out to him that had been 15 years ago.
I am reminded of a family legend related to me by Mme D concerning the reaction to the birth of her younger sister. The eldest had been a boy (my brother-in-law), followed by the future Mme D, then along came the third. Apparently, her grandmother’s reaction on hearing the happy news of a new granddaughter was to look aghast and cry: “A girl ... again?”
Given that “…again?” would have been no less accurate an observation if the child had been male, one wonders what she had been hoping for instead. A litter of puppies perhaps.
The initial user response to the next round of corporate training, however, has a different ring to it. Despite the usual nervousness about the changeover, it seems that everyone is looking forward to the training. What’s so different about this project?
If there’s anything worse than being bullied by your boss into taking training days away from your desk, only to return to shitloads of work that simply piled up in your absence, it’s being offered no training at all. And the latter, it turns out, is exactly what most of the users received at the last iamge database software roll-out.
What, nobody got trained on the old system? I’m impressed. The existing system might be creaking at the network seams but it is powerful… and complex. Its interface is shockingly unintuitive and its menus are non-standard, often unintelligible. It has both a Search command and a separate Find command, which look entirely different, operate entirely differently and do entirely different things. Most of the other menus are greyed out and stubbonly remain so, no matter what you do.
I have never located a user guide for this system and as for the Help ... well, we all know what happens when you call up Help in software these days: dickety fuck-all.
So how the heck has anyone managed to work out how to use it?
It turns out that at the original roll-out of that old CMS – early in the industrial revolution by the look of it – a handful of senior staff did receive the necessary training, on the understanding that they would subsequently train their underlings themselves. It is possible that they might even have done so.
Since then, however, none of the original trainees still works at the company, nor indeed do any of their underlings that they trained, nor their descendants, servants or livestock. No-one for generations, it would appear, has received any formal training, nor is there any documentation. No PDF, no printouts – not even the original papyrus scroll survives.
As a result, learning how to use one of the most important software systems at the company has become an oral tradition passed from one hapless employee to the next. When a casual shift worker turns up for the first time, he must approach the Tent Cubicle of the CMS Elders and sit around a campfire to hear a wizened office Gandalf recite arcane GREP expressions – all obscure but definitively regular – from cultural memory.
It is like Beowulf but more violent, when the pain comes. Some employees run screaming from the tent. Others are driven mad by the horror and spend the rest of the day sprawled out on beanbags in the office break-out pods, dribbling and in a near-catatonic state.
The worst-affected are the most terrifying: they return to their desks and do their best to hack their way through the old system’s undocumented UI disaster zone. Their jovial banter has been silenced. The glint in their eyes has died out. Offers to make rounds of tea and coffee have ceased. They will never be the same again.
Over at the Customer Satisfaction Agency – that is, the department formerly known as IT support – things have been growing tense as only a couple of people, themselves contractors, know how any of the old system works. The last person to know how it ALL works was laid to rest back in the 15th Century and his weather-worn tombstone can be visited in the grounds of St Albans cathedral.
So for the first time in my professional experience, I am facing a queue of corporate Tiggers eager to be retrained in a replacement system. They can’t wait.
I confidently expect my heroic exploits over the next few months to be immortalised in epic poetry. As they struggle to get to grips with ancient browser-based database access, future civilisations will sing my name in admiration and dread.
Until the next upgrade, of course.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He is sure it will be only a matter of a couple of years before formal training in the new system stops altogether, so he is preparing the documentation in easy-to-remember rhyming couplets. This may have the unfortunate side-effect of immortalising the Dabbsy name not so much in epic poetry as in a series of dirty limericks. Share your limerick-writing skills in the Comments.
One could write down what knowledge a user has gained in a word document or even a wiki. Both will one day be filed and/or forgotten. Perhaps something like the Bayeaux Tapestry or Egyptian hieroglyphs would be better?
I will be retiring at the end of next year from a 39 years position. I am trying to document all the procedures I have set-up along all these years, this is a very unpleasant work.