"Oops, THEY did it again..."

Well, the plan WAS to sleep on Tuesday during the day, like normal, because I had been up all Monday night, like normal, so I could go in and teach on Tuesday night, like normal.

What happened wasn't "normal" ...but seems like it is becoming normal.

At 3:00 a.m. in the morning, as I was winding up the previous night's work and preparing to go to sleep before the evening's class, I got a surprise call from the project Team Lead telling me to be at the office by 5:00 to teach a DAY-TIME class. What?

After several emails to my other trainer here and to our bosses back in the States we found out that they were indeed serious, and that the local team "thought" they had informed us of the schedule change (oh, really?), and that Yes, we did need to be there in spite of the fact we would be teaching a class and would have been up for 24 hours straight.

What's weird is that after a trans-Atlantic conference call with our hiring manager and our supervisor (two different companies) we were told to go ahead and go to sleep, that the schedule change would NOT take place... and then barely ten minutes later we got new direction and were told that we DID have to go in after all!

:(

There has been lots of miscommunication right from the beginning of this project, which is not surprising since there are four different companies (and me) involved, but it IS surprising when you consider the professional caliber of the people and the reputation of the respective companies.

Oh well, what can you do when you are the little guy? "Yes, sir. Right away, sir."

So I took a quick shower to wake myself up, grabbed a cold sandwich from the 24-hour window downstairs, and called a hotel car... since of course no transportation had been arranged for us.

We got to the office in plenty of time and had a short meeting with the Team Lead to go over what they thought they had communicated to us, but really hadn't. Class ended up going well, considering the circumstances, as Brian and I were both very tired. I had a little trouble focusing on the material.

Not that this was any comfort, but the employees in the class had their hours changed too! They normally work the night shift (answering phones for customers in the US, so they have to keep American business hours) but for some reason on this three-day training they had to come in for a daytime shift. Great, now both the instructors AND the students are falling asleep in class!

Prasad looks half-asleep but Takshil and Shahab are feeling good!

Tuesday was hard, and by Wednesday we were just running on just steam, but Thursday (today) was a little better. Tomorrow starts another three-day class... and then we go back to the night shift for the rest of the project! Change is the only constant thing here.

Sometimes it seems the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Two previous times we have gotten phone calls from project management in the middle of our sleep time asking where we were and WHY we weren't at some important meeting, when they should have known what our schedule was and that we were sleeping. Again, all you can do is say, "We'll be there as soon as we can."

And now the strangest thing is that this last group got the highest scores on the Final Assessment that anyone has had so far, a 98.5% average grade! Shh, don't tell anyone, or they'll keep changing our hours every week!!

:)

Very happy students from our class; they won a pizza party because they beat the record high score!