Training Training Training

(title to be sung to the tune of “Rolling Rolling Rolling”)

The IT training has started in earnest, and it’s… just like being back at uni. Apart from of course the whole business clothes and rareified atmosphere of genuine concentration that many of the other people have. I obviously have much too much time on my hands, which is why I’m here, after all. We’re covering the basics of Unix, and I’m genuinely bored out of my mind. How do these people claim to be graduates of IT programs with zero exposure to operating systems beyond Windows? How do these people hope to work?!

Of course, being a gigantic organisation, we can take these people on our books because they’re hired as “Business Analysts”, where they take the requirements from the users and turn them into a design for an outsourced (or ‘smartsourced’, as my team is) programming team. However, for the project that we will be doing in the next month or so, I need to have more coders around me because fundamentally IT in the app-dev world comes down to some actual development. These people take a dim view of working at the code face, and from my perspective, that’s not the right perspective to have; you simply don’t understand the scale of the job if you’ve never done it hands-on.

Outside of the daily-grind training, I’m having about the most fun I’ve had in my life. I’ve got money to spend, I’m in a faraway location, and I have little responsibilities after 5 pm. No dinner to cook, no bathroom to clean, no anything really to take care of – should I choose to go home, I’d just be sitting in front of the TV spacing out… So what’s a guy to do? Well, to put it gently, my liver’s taken a hammering over the last week or so. But hey! That’s the European atmosphere for ya (“Water with dinner? Surely you mean beir, ja?” Ah, I love Germans when they’re drunk).

For anyone that missed it, my trip to Amsterdam was alright… if anything, overrated by everyone who’s told me to go there. I suppose I would enjoy it more had I gone with close friends, but from my experience of travel, if you can’t enjoy it alone then enjoying it with friends could just as easily have been acheived elsewhere. Much more to see and do yet, though, so hopefully I’ll get a better experience out of my later travels.