Training trouble, forecast f up, less and more numbers
So yesterday wrapped up my at home training session. It was my worst experience with at home training to date.
The class was for Microsoft Hyper-V, a package that allows you to run virtual servers, something that may be advantageous in our work environment. In our “class” we had three students, all of whom were remote. In the past, my classes had a combination of students physically in the classroom and remotely located. Well since there were no students scheduled to be on site, the instructor was also working from home. This turned out to be problematic.
The teacher kept all of the students on mute for the first day. He said if we had a question we should type it in the chat box and he would unmute us. He said based on his years of experience he found this was the best way to do things. I found it annoying and severely limiting as far as making the class interactive. Most of the time if one of the students typed something the instructor wouldn’t even notice it until long after it was pertinent. Instead he would just ramble on and we were his silent, captive audience.
Having the instructor remote added another point of failure in the data chain since not only did we need to be remoted to the training facility but to the guys house as well. We had off and on issues with performance throughout the class with spotty audio and video, including a full out outage during the afternoon of day two that lasted several hours.
The training facility also dropped the ball when it came to preparing the student machines. They were not configured as they were supposed to be to work with the labs. In some cases it just caused aggravation as we had to adjust on the fly to make things work. In other cases the misconfiguration caused some labs to simply fail. The instructor tried to fix the problems, causing further delays and lack of productivity. He was not successful in his attempts.
Then on the last day, the day you typically want to get everything wrapped up early, we instead had our longest day. It was the day when the instructor decided to be the most verbose. During the last few hours I was totally tuned out and just waiting for it to end.
During the class I was doing private chats to the other students and found out they thought it was as lame as I did. The one woman requested a credit from her sales rep because the class was that lame. I did the same this morning.
Late yesterday afternoon the cleaning crew showed up. I attended to various things while they were there, one of which was pulling up the various cold protection I set up outside since the forecast was for warmer temps in the low to mid 40’s Wednesday night.
It wasn’t the exact same cleaning crew as before. They got busy cleaning as I loosely watched while I worked. I was a bit pleased and disappointed at the same time. I saw them doing some unexpected cleaning like cleaning the shelves in the fridge and the pans under the burners on the stove. But I didn’t see them wash the tile in the kitchen, utility rooms and bathrooms, something I expected to be part of the regular cleaning cycle.
The crew of three were done in about 75 minutes. When I asked them what the bill was, the one who understood some english didn’t know. She called the woman who runs the business. The $100 she came up with was ok, about what we talked about but when I do the math of $20 per hour per person, it works out to more like $75. I certainly wasn’t going to try to squabble about $25 with the girls that were there. Trying to communicate that would be like pulling teeth. I do plan to contact the woman in charge and let her know I am ok with the money but I would like to get the time I am paying for and hopefully that time includes washing the floor.
Like I mentioned, I removed all of the covers and pots I had out on the landscape since the cold snap was forecast to finally moderate with low’s in the 40’s Wednesday night. Imagine my joy when I got up this morning and saw 36 degrees on the thermometer. I was f’ing pissed. If I knew it was going to stay that cold I would have left all the coverings on. Now my preservation efforts are more than likely wasted. Did I mention I am pissed off?
Yesterday on my lunch break I did another attempt at the Bar-barian challenge. I made adjustments to address some of the problems with Monday’s attempt, mainly bad timing of the breaks and problems using the walker as a high speed dip station.
For timing I used my wrist watch and simply did the math instead of trying to f around with resetting the stopwatch. For dips I decided to use two of the dining room chairs.
Just using the chairs alone doesn’t work, they want to tip backwards if I support myself on the backs. To address that issue I drug in 160 pounds of plates from the shed and put 80 pounds on each seat. Doing this stabilized things greatly. Using chairs also allowed me to set the width to my liking. I picked 23-24 inches as the sweet spot.
So the attempt started out well. My new dip set up resulted in a dramatic increase in my numbers, jumping from 15 on Monday to 25 on Tuesday. I had to really push to get rep 23,24 and 25. I was pumped to be off to such a good start and I figured 100+ reps should be in my sights.
Well going to failure on my first set of dips really affected the rest of my exercises. I did less reps in every other exercise, it was pretty pathetic. I limped to the finish line with only 89 reps, my smallest total to date.
I was disappointed but there were some positives, I used much better form on my push ups than Mondays effort and I actually managed to keep my break times within a second or two of regulation. If you watch the video you can tell I am doing the best I could, I just didn’t have much left in the tank.
I do have one number that has increased, my age. Today I turn 43 years old. It seems surreal to look in the mirror and have to declare myself as that old. All I can do is continue to try to be as immature as possible to offset the ever advancing days on the calendar. It comes and goes so fast at this age, I wish there was a way to tap the brakes.
I need to celebrate by doing 43 of something at the gym today.