Navy Training

We have to take a lot of training here at the Navy. We have a requirement to acquire at least 80 hours of it every two years- just like when I worked for Honeywell. Except with Honeywell, it was a department average (meaning the hours of training taken by a department divided by the number of employees had to exceed 80) leading us to speculate that we would be better off if each group hired a "training guy," who just spent all of his time in class while the rest of us got our work done. I mean, that's a win-win-win! Alas, here you're actually accountable for every one of those hours personally.

I'm all in favor of continuous learning, especially when it's a course that helps me do my job better, or teaches me something new. However, 95% of the stuff we take is Prevention of Sexual Harassment, or Phishing Prevention, or Trafficking in Persons Awareness*- stuff that you should really know already, or that's common sense. Plus, they changed the way it's tracked: now it's 80 hours of training per "period." What's a period, you ask? Well, it's however long it takes you to get 80 hours, but it must be less than two years. This means that as soon as you hit 80, your personal training timer resets. I'll describe how I discovered this for you:

I started here in January 2003. So, when I had accumulated 80 hours of training I was set until January 2005. When January 2005 rolled around, I had until January 2007 to get another 80 hours. Being no dummy, I signed up for a two week course in February 2005, which knocked out my requirement for the next two years right off the bat. Therefore, I didn't have to do anything until January 2007, at which point I would have another two full years to get my next 80, right? Wrong! They had just changed the rules, so as soon as I finished the class, my training period reset. I was now on the hook for another 80 hours by February 2007! Even though I had just completed 80 hours! RARR! My brilliant plan lay in tatters- I had essentially spent two weeks in a class for nothing. Well, other than learning about Navy systems acquisition, but you know what I mean.

I wasn't the only person outraged by this new procedure, and HR was flooded with complaints and questions about why it was changed. Their answer was that "this will make people take their training more regularly, instead of meeting their requirement early and then not taking any classes for a few years." Are they kidding!? They just removed any and all motivation to do training ahead of time! This immediately had the effect we all predicted it would: now no one takes anything ahead of time, and we all wait until the last minute to take training. We're no fools. This is not the first time HR launched a plan that ended up resulting in the exact opposite of what they intended.

Anyway, that brings us to today, when I took the required ERP overview training (which was the whole motivation for this rant). It's pretty bad, because it's a web-based slideshow, and the guy has a boring, droning voice, and he's just reading the slides, and it's really dull, etc. What took the cake was the quizzes that are sprinkled throughout the slides. This was my favorite question, reprinted verbatim:

What are the three ways to acquire an asset?
A. CPP Acquisition
B. Manual Acquisition
C. PR/PO Acquisition
D. All of the above

Is that a joke? I mean, the question asks for three answers! Maybe if each choice listed three different things this would be valid, but as it stands, there's only one possible answer. Needless to say, the quizzes weren't very taxing.

Another annoying thing about this class is that they use the same stock photography over and over on the slides. This picture has been used numerous times, and I like it for a couple of reasons. First, the way you can see the muzzle flashes from all three guns (as though they all fired at the very instant the camera snapped) reminds me of the old GI Joe Box art. Second, it made me think of the movie The Transporter, which was the first movie I saw in which during the on-screen shootouts the bullets made visible tracer-like streaks, leading to this exchange between Jamie and me:

Me: I like that they added in streaks to make you feel like you could see the bullets. It was a nice pratical use of CG.
Jamie: It didn't have to be CG- they could have used tracer bullets and slowed down the film speed.
Me: Are you suggesting that they were actually shooting at the actors during filming?

I didn't actually finish the training today, which means I get to do more tomorrow. I did get to the part where they explain that ERP is directly tied to me getting paid (which is one of the main reasons I go to work at all**) so you can be sure I'm going to finish it.

* Trafficking in Persons may well be my favorite training course ever, and could be a post in itself. The point of the course was to teach you to recognize situations in which people could be slaves or indentured servants, and how to report it. It was a web-based Java applet that played like a game in which you actually steered a little guy around town, and when you went into different buildings little Choose Your Own Adventure-like dialogue boxes popped up depending on where you were. For instance, in the restaurant it told you things like "You notice that the cook is chained to the grill," or in the brothel you "notice that the girls seem to be very young." I am not making this up. I guess it's important to note that everyone in the Navy had to take this, so it's probably meant more for the 18-year-old enlisted guy who is now on shore leave in Thailand after leaving the farm for the first time than it is for a bunch of civilian engineers.

** Other reasons include free shirts/jackets/pens that are branded with our division title, which I once again use outside the office now that our name switched back to "Air Vehicle Engineering" after a baffling stint with the redundant "Aircraft and Unmanned Air Vehicle Engineering." Also, sometimes people bring in donuts.