Chantal - Have Laptop Will Travel

Liam made the effort to communicate and reach out to us; Tara does not. Admittedly I missed the end of Monday and start of Tuesday, but we have spent the last three days working through exercise booklets, practising using a database that does not work, and sitting two ‘exams’. During presentations, where she reads and rereads directly off the slide, we are told to switch off our monitors so that we do not tune her out as is our natural instinct. We can read faster than she can read and reread and rereread aloud. One of the smokers was discreetly playing a game, another was chatting online. A guy two desks down was nodding off over an online newspaper. I subtly tweaked my CV, then sent a quick email to my temp agent apologising that it would take me longer than planned to change it and send it over to her. The Problem Management team gave us a short presentation; Tara stood at the back for the second half. As soon as they left, she blasted us for our disrespect in continuing to surf the internet in their presence, and indeed in hers.

Despite our varying levels of experience, we cannot be expected to sit quietly while we are fed the most basic of computer training, with too long to work on exercises and exams without trying to keep otherwise busy. Most of us are from abroad, and are either trying to arrange settling here, or stay in touch with friends and family back home. And again, despite the levels of experience, all of us are uniformly bored and the trainers seem reluctant to accept this and adapt their training style and content accordingly. Indeed, this approach to training: presentations and exercises, with minimal interaction, does not allow for even determining our learning speeds and difficulties, opting instead for a general blanket tuition that will satisfy the training requirement.

I spend my breaks in the smoking room, despite the other smokers’ preference to stand outside in the biting cold and wind. There are a few who join me, but the main social point is during our hour-long lunchbreak. For all but two of us, this is our first time of working on this, or any business park, and we are finding it hard to adjust to entertaining ourselves within the walls of the building. I have read all of the cards in the shop, as well as newspaper headlines and magazine fronts. I’ve also read all of the plaques and signs on the walls; this took part of one lunchbreak. There is a small gym, but we are not yet entitled to use it; there is also a rumoured pool room, but only one of us knows where it is. Usually I am too dehumanised and livid by each breaktime to want to mix much, so I eat my lunch with the others and then slope off for some solitude and nicotine. Two people usually join me: an Irish non-smoker, who stays to chat for a while, and a French smoker who tells me his stories of heavy drinking, blacking out, and getting fired.

Small groups are forming, but conversation is at least partly strained by the different nationalities and languages among us, and the conflict between speaking in a native tongue or English, depending on the mix of people and the topics of conversation. I joke that coming to Dublin is far better an opportunity to learn German, Italian, Spanish or French rather than the more obvious English. When talking about the others, it is a surprise to find out how few names each has learned; we usually have to run through their nationality, which language team they will be working on, where they sit in the room and any distinguishing characteristics before giving up. One woman has already left, and yet very few know who she was.

Much as we dread returning to the training room, there is so little to do in our lunchbreaks that we usually return early, and sit outside despairingly, making feeble jokes, until the trainer arrives to unlock the room. There is a phone in the room that worked for part of last week which we would queue up to use; now that Tara insists on locking the room outside of class time, even if we could use it, we would not be allowed to. I wanted to relieve the pressure on my flatmate in London so offered to make some of the phone calls to take my name off of the bills, and have not as yet even taken them out of my bag. Henning, a German, has been waiting over four weeks for his contract, and is anxiously trying to chase this up (the agency’s email addresses conveniently no longer work), as well as straighten out logistic problems back in Germany.

Another feature of our training sessions is the air conditioning. As I emailed someone, the ones who are too hot are far louder in their protests than those who are too cold to be able to muster faint squeaks of discomfort. An Argentinian/Taiwanese woman sits next to the thermostat, and firmly keeps it on cool; I swapped my work jacket for my biker jacket when I was back in London, and have yet to take it off. I turned the heating up high after lunch today; within a few minutes, Tara was complaining that the room was too stuffy.

Despite our attempts to start each day with a fresh and positive outlook, we know what awaits us, and even though we may not know what is to be covered (or not: we are already two days behind schedule), we know what the presentation and attitude of Tara will be. Most spend the day chatting online, playing games or emailing in the need to keep sane, although there is a small number who long for extra tuition time, maybe staying late or coming in weekends so that they can cover subjects in yet more depth. At break times we will finish the email we are writing or game we are playing before rushing for the door, and the main topic of conversation will be exasperation. The only time I have seen everyone smile and look happy is when we were unexpectedly informed yesterday that we would be finishing early. And yet this overwhelming sense of foreboding and frustration clouds the real situation: that we have been hired by IBM to work on their helpdesk, an excellent opportunity in itself. Even if it does not lead to further opportunities within IBM, we can almost guarantee the doors it will open for us on leaving. Regardless of our experience or background, we have been presented with this chance to establish ourselves within the industry, and yet we do not know whether we are filled with more dread at the thought of the next day or the training finally coming to an end.