No victory is a small one...

It's rare for me to write about work happenings, but I had to celebrate this one.

I'm responsible for all of our internal and external training, and we have one department who is a primary "customer." Normally, this is a good thing, except when the head of said department functions at High Panic levels throughout the day (see also: Spin-Dry.) This person is hereafter known as Spin Master. (Not to be confused with Spin Doctor.)

There isn't a person on my team or beyond who hasn't had some kind of run-in with SM, so it's now a quaint part of our corporate culture. Meetings and phone calls with SM are ususally dreaded and endured.

But, I digress.

Whenever we get ready with a new client release, we normally arrange for some sort of training event/session for SM's team, but with shifting dates and other things, SM usually goes into a tail-spin and rants about scheduling and coverage and workload....except for the fact that his team isn't carrying a big workload right now and is currently under-utilized. One of my right-hand cohorts has spent some time up at SM's location to conduct events and also to help pilot our e-learning work.

This week's madness was a new client pilot event. This is a very small pilot and the short version is that the impact on SM's team will be miniscule. Maybe one event per month. Yours truly makes use of his grey matter and determines that, in light of current workloads and the potential impact, that a formal training session isn't required and that we can simply make the appropriate reference materials available to SM's team and then if, and that's a big "if", an event occurs, then the staff know where to find the reference material to handle it. Seems simple enough, right?

SM's first response, "So when are we getting training on this?"

Me: *blank stare into phone*

When later informed that we didn't feel that training was required, SM went ape-shit.

So, I hauled SM down to my cube and figured I'd lay it all out for dicussion.

I set aside an entire hour for histrionics.

SM: hey, this looks simple, we can handle it ourselves.

Me: *mentally picking self up from floor*

It was a Bizzarro moment: No arguements, no whining, no crying jags, no complaints....

All my days should go like this!

(P.S. Also managed to sort out a misinformed client about some of their training requirements when my favourite Project Mangler dumped yet another short notice requirement on me. God save me from Engineers who think they have a clue...) I'm two-for-two today!