You want me to do what now?

I rarely act surprised. I typically remain basically deadpan about anything, regardless of what it is. Sometimes, that gets me work that I'd rather not do. Case in point: This morning I walk by my boss' office and he calls me in, asking, "Would you be okay training KLine (one of our customers) on Rate Access (a module of our software) today?"

The correct response to that question should have been a deer in headlights stare. Maybe a bit of drool running down the corner of my mouth or something. That would have been appropriate. But instead, I gave a confident, "Sure!".

I've been ass-deep on another project for the last few weeks, for another customer, and I have therefore not had much time to take a look at the new release of our software that we are training these people on. I don't know it all that well. And I just agreed to train an important customer on it. Yes, I am an idiot.

But there was no one else to do it, and I knew my boss wasn't looking for a yes or no answer. He was basically telling me I was doing the training. I know this. That's why I said sure.

And the training went fine. Well, it went as fine as I expected it to go. This release has problems. There's a lot of new functionality that does work, but it doesn't really work the way that our customers would expect. And, and lot of this new functionality is not intuitive at all. But despite that, the training went fine. I even went over more than just the module I was assigned to cover, since they were asking me rather specific questions about other areas of the product. And thankfully, it seemed that they understood that I was not the person to complain to about changes in functionality. I was only there to show them what was there.

One enjoyable part about this training was that this customer is in the United Kingdom. I do love their accents.

Apart from business, I have a new band that I've recently discovered and have been listening to. I can sort of tie them into this post because of the whole UK thing. These guys are from the UK as well. There, see, a connection. And yes, I love their accent as well. I could listen to them all day long.

Anyway, the band is called "The Kooks". Their music has this "feel-good" quality to it. You listen and you just feel pretty good. Here's an example: