Training wheels

This week my supervisor asked a bunch of us to complete some online training by Friday, so I’ve been working my way through it a little bit each day. It’s desiccant-dry stuff, but it also happens to be, you know, basically the whole upshot of the work that the agency I’m contracted to focuses on. So, after a year or more of being on this contract, absorbing that kind of info makes me feel a bit more in-the-loop. (Which is still not enough to make the material interesting, per se, but ah well.)

To once more use my metaphor of choice, it’s as if the DoD agency where I work is involved in producing widgets in location A and shipping them via magic truck to location B. I don’t know how the widgets get made or what they do or what happens to them after they arrive at their destination, and I don’t really have to know any of that, because I’m just a mechanic for the magic truck. As long as the magic truck is working, I don’t really have much to do, but if the magic truck breaks down, I have to fix it as fast as possible. And if someone decides the widget-shipping process would be well-served by changing the way the magic tuck works in some way, I make the modifications. I have no problem with this state of affairs.

But apparently someone way up above me thinks everyone should at least be trained on the widget basics, and thus I find myself watching long, exhaustively detailed training slideshows with minimally competent voiceover narration, and then taking online multiple-choice quizzes to make sure I’ve absorbed the minimum required amount of comprehension. The quiz aspect is actually unforgiving to the point of being a little bit nerve-wracking. Each quiz is only five questions, which means you can only get one question wrong before failing the whole thing. And the questions aren’t really gimmes, I was somewhat shocked to discover when I took the first one. I have taken corporate training evaluations in the past where it’s like “If you suspect someone in the company is committing malfeasance, whom should you notify? A) Batman B) Santa Claus C) Perez Hilton D) Your supervisor and/or HR representative.” (And yes, I have somehow managed to get those questions right and not just automatically answer “Batman!”) But the quizzes this week have actually required careful reading and recollection and honestly all of it has produced a twinge of anxiety that reminds me of the worst aspects of school. There is a reason, after all, why I drifted steadily away from the sciences with their “exams” and more towards the humanities with their “read this book and then write something tangentially inspired by it”.

In any case, that’s all fairly mundane stuff, and although it falls under this here blog’s purview as a collection of stuff that’s happening in my life currently, I’m also bringing it up because one exceptional slide in the training program actually made me laugh. In a quietly muted, professional way of course, but still.

I shouldn’t divulge too many state secrets if I can help it, but since I’ve already admitted to working for the DoD you can imagine that some of the agency’s work involves military equipment like vehicles and weapons systems. Most of the slides, referring to these types of equipment in aggregate, would illustrate the concept with collages of photographs. But one slide was trying to pictographically get across the idea of moving equipment around – whatever that equipment might be. So how did they represent the nebulous idea of various kinds of equipment? With a hilarious composite, of course. I can’t even imagine how many man-hours went into this, but some graphic designer somewhere amused himself by creating a clip art image that resembles nothing seen in the real world, ever: a soldier riding in a tank turret on top of a boat hull with jeep wheels mounted on the front and tank treads on the back, fighter jet wings and engines sticking out of the sides, helicopter rotor blades coming out the top, gigantic missile racks flanking the turret, and a random satellite dish sprouting out of the bow.

My little guy’s birthday is coming up, and if some toy company somewhere actually made a boat-jeep-tank-jet-copter-missile-launcher I would of course buy it for him in a heartbeat, even if I had to hide it for six years because all the fidgety little accessories are only safety-rated for ages 8+. But as far as I know, such a thing is too radical for even the madmen behind GIJoe’s arsenal to ever mass-produce. So I have to tip my hat to the person who so successfully encapsulated the idea of “military vehicles and weapon systems (ALL)” into a never-before-conceived-of single picture, because if I had been tasked with it, I probably would have just recycled this:


Mainly because a single eyeball on things automatically makes them at least 33% more awesome. But props to the mystery graphic designer behind the training materials for not shamelessly ripping off Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and instead creating something brand new and amusing. Never let it be said that people contractually obligated to produce bland, utilitarian training materials for the government have no sense of humor.