I remembered last night just as I was falling asleep that I’m in a training class today and tomorrow–Intermediate Spreadsheet Aided Engineering. This type of class is always sort of cool because it’s a change of pace, and because I usually learn at least a few little cool tricks.
This morning has been frustrating though. First of all, the woman sitting next to me is bizarre. She almost dropped out of the class because she didn’t want to fill out the registration form. Seriously! She had some issue with having to fill out a form and disappeared for half an hour to “call someone” after the woman told her she had to fill out the form or not take the class (NASA actually pays San Jacinto college for the classes, so we have to register with San Jac). She reappeared, so I guess they worked it out, but it was bizarre.
The other big frustration is that the way JSC coordinates their training classes is very inefficient, meaning that 6 out of the 10 people in the intermediate class have never taken the beginning class. It’s not really their fault; it’s the JSC training organization that can’t get it right. But it’s a problem for everyone, and it means that now the instructor is basically re-teaching the beginning class instead of the intermediate class.
Now, you would be tempted to think “oh, I’m sure they can catch up.” But no. I swear it’s like these people have never seen Excel before, and when you throw in Visual Basic, you can practically see the steam coming from their ears. At the moment, the instructor is teaching us about the Euler method. AGH! Dude, I learned the Euler method in college. We’re all engineers here. I don’t want to re-learn the Euler method, I want to learn how to program my spreadsheet to do it for me. Actually, I want to learn how to program a lot more than that, but I’d settle for just programming anything at this point. I don’t need to be taught how you can reorder the worksheets in a spreadsheet.
I know I’m complaining a lot, but come on. This is a total waste of my time, and by extension, NASA’s money! (Both the money they paid to let me take this class and the money they’re paying me while I sit here!)
