Tuesday, December 27, 2011

A Christmas Quiz...

Merry Christmas everybody - where ever you are, what ever you are doing and who ever you are with - I hope you have a safe and festive time.

I am back to work - 'capacity building' in the tropics.

I have a little Christmas quiz for you, its guess the age of the group of people I am describing;

They are a group of 15 people who are coming to a training day. They are coming because they have been told to come and will get a $4 per diem if they attend the whole day.

The invitation says the start time is 8 am - 10 out of the 15 arrive after 8 30 am.

The first session is setting the ground rules - the first rule is that they want change the morning session end time from 12 to 11 am, this gives them a 3 hour instead of 2 hour lunch break. When the facilitator tries to negotiate that as they mostly arrived over half an hour late for the start of the session that perhaps they could compromise and stay until 11 30 am (their usual lunch break start time) - this suggestion is rejected.

The second ground rule to be set is that there should be no use of mobile phones - they reject this but say they will switch to silent-mode. The next 2 hours is a cacophony of various mobile phone ring tones and loud intrusive phone conversations.

When asked after a lecture if there is any questions one person asks why he doesn't have a free pen and only a free pencil in his free folder, this is the only question.

The snacks arrive, there is a stampede to the table even before the teaching session is over. The first people to arrive take plastic carrier bags and fill them up to the brim with snacks for themselves and then leave the teaching. The remaining people have a bottle of water and a small piece of fruit if they are quick enough.

At 11 01 everyone looks at the watches, starts to mumble and leaves; despite the fact there is a demonstration on how to deliver effective CPR still in progress.

They have in fairness been quite well behaved today so far.

Those of you who have children or work with children have an unfair advantage as you should be able to gauge which age-group demonstrate these types of behaviour.
























A.The average age of this group of Doctors & Nurses is 40 years old.

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