Project Everest Part Three

When rolling out a brand new software system such as Oracle that employees have never seen before let alone even heard of, you have to swiftly organize a major training effort. Tens of thousands of employees will have to be introduced to a new-fangled strange beast and become educated in its use. People need to be identified as trainers to run classes that will enable the peasant masses to run this stuff. So, who do you select to be those teachers? Who do you assign to be the champions of Oracle knowledge? You choose the most inept, useless, ignorant, and annoying managers in the company of course! There is no other possibility. After all anyone truly capable has better things to be doing with their time.

In my department Oracle training classes were taught by Miss Malta. The moment I heard she was going to be our teacher for a week or two worth of three hour Oracle sessions I knew we were completely screwed. Miss Malta doesn't communicate well with anybody, especially her fellow females because she has contempt for them. Why I have no clue. Basically she is a nearly illiterate manager that fails time and again to speak clearly in front of a group, read, spell, or write. Usually when she has to write a business report or do something simple like respond to an email she will make one of her subordinates write it for her. Her spelling is truly atrocious to the point of being comical and she's too stupid to use a program with built-in spell check.

That's how dumb she is.

During the first Oracle training session myself and twenty or so fellow employees sat through hour after hour of instruction that didn't make any sense. Miss Malta talked at us in pidgeon English and she was easily sidetracked by the most basic questions. At the same time the majority of our group became wildly confused by Oracle's myriad web pages and counter intuitive drop down menus. Things went so poorly that first day I spent most of my time in front of a computer terminal web surfing. Each day after that seemed like a bad television re-run in Oracle school. Nobody got anywhere with it.

Boredom forced me to experiment with Oracle on my own while everyone else in training appeared to be trapped in Oracle sub menus or lost on some other web page. I did no better than the rest of my group, but I didn't care about it. Miss Malta quickly lost control of the situation at every class. She impatiently mumbled instructions to her frustrated students which ended up making things entirely worse. Every so often I would look up from my flat screen monitor to scan over the rest of our class. I saw nothing but aggravated faces and computer screen chaos throughout the room.

The implementation of Oracle was going to fail miserably because it was being rushed onto the shop floor. Forcing Oracle down our throats wasn't going to work. Training appeared to be an afterthought. Super Geek decreed that everyone would learn to use Oracle or else by the deadline.

A few days' worth of digging around in Oracle's guts gave me the feeling this would become yet another example of a one-size-fits-all solution for problems we didn't have. The menus were over complicated, database load times took forever, categories in sub-systems made little to no sense. Every time I selected an action on a page, Oracle responded slower than dogshit. On the production floor we would be using Oracle to move instruments from station to station as work was completed in assembly and test. It didn't seem to function as advertised.