So. Many. Acronyms.

[mousme]

The training is, as I feared, rather boring, and filled with acronyms. Like, 43 pages' worth of acronyms, and that's not an exaggeration, it's the real number. Luckily I don't have to learn them all by heart. The instructor is very experienced in his field, but he doesn't exactly have a flair for pedagogy. He spent the day reading PowerPoint slides to us, of which we already had paper copies. I practically faceplanted on my desk out of boredom. I'm not the most engaging speaker ever, but I flatter myself that on the whole, I can do better than that.

It didn't help that the poor dog kept me up half the night with digestive distress. Again. He's very sweet about it: he just comes and stands politely by my bed until I wake up, but the fact remains that I was up every hour and a half and was therefore very tired today. Combine that with hours of very boring class and a darkened room to allow for the PowerPoint presentation, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open. I hope the instructor didn't notice. That would be super embarrassing for the both of us.

The plan today is to go to bed early, in the hopes that I will be better rested tomorrow. It's been a refreshing change to be able to get home before dark, in any event. Eight hour days practically feel like a vacation these days. Almost.

Comments

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

It's remarkable (but not entirely surprising) to hear that a topic that engaged my imagination so much as a teenager (though it helped that the fora in which I was hearing about it referred to it as "hacking", "phreaking", "social engineering", and "countermeasures") can be made appallingly dull by the right(?) setting.

I don't imagine it being possible to make the training interesting by reframing it as hacking, but I do imagine that the trainer may have once identified as a hacker, and can form all too clear a mental picture of what it might feel like if I were in his shoes, trying to maintain a facade of teaching, just as disdainful as you of the 43 pages of acronyms, wondering what happened to my soul.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Without being able to go into much detail, I must say that what we're going over has less to do with the content than the packaging, as it were. We're concentrating entirely on the mechanics of keeping the physical stuff logged and accounted for, rather than studying interception or hacking itself. I am getting certified to be a Custodian, with all the paperwork that entails. In fact, today we spent several hours literally going over every single form that needs to be filled out, when it needs to be filled out, and by whom. Fascinating stuff, forms.

I suspect the instructor may feel as you suggest, though, given the details of his career that he shared with us at the beginning of the week. It sounds like he's had a colourful time of it.

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

Oh, custody processes. That sounds about as exciting as escorting documents around (my sister was telling me the other day that sometimes she has to do this to documents when she's the lowest-ranking officer cleared to handle them -- of course she'd rather be flying satellites, which is her main job).