Long, labourious day that limped along on one lame leg. Eight hours of gruelling software training today and yesterday in which words like term delimiter, textbase, termbase, analysis agent, etc. could have been Japanese for all I understood of the past two days. I hated training on computer-assisted translation (CAT) software in university and I’m sad to say that nothing has changed. It didn’t help that all day my neighbour kept scanning news articles and surfing the web, so out of the corner of my eye I kept catching webpages that flashed, distracting my attention from trying to follow both the trainer’s oral presentation and then replicate it on my own screen at the speed of lightning. I am definitely not an auditory learner when it comes to technical info. Not to mention our computer lab was stuffy and deleterious, giving us all headaches by the end of the day.
On the one hand, we had a great trainer — a young, multilingual Francophone who has travelled all over the place and wasn’t afraid of getting close, finding out what we were interested in to better orientate the sessions. Unfortunately, the training itself — combined with an impossibly-large user guide of 3 training modules at a total of 120 pages — was not even REMOTELY tailored to the work we currently do and use the software for. This was “upgrade” training for the older employees (and a waste of time for those of us who don’t even have basic knowledge of it) who have worked on the previous version (3.7) for several years now, and this session was to introduce the features of the new version (4.) we are supposed to get licenses for in the next few months. Of course, the company is now launching version 4.2 next month. That’s clearly reflective of how fast the government moves to get things done.
Anyways, I worked a 12-hour shift in front of a computer today; maybe I’m just crabby. 
Now I’m eating dinner (late!) and dessert, a decaf Chai latté steeped and stirred with a splash of Sensational Soy Classic Vanilla™ milk that is much too sweet to drink plain but that plays off the spicy nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice of the Chai beautifully to make a stellar cup of tea before bedtime. I might treat myself and stay up to watch Gilmore Girls, even though I have to drag my sorry ass out of bed, past mountains of unwashed laundry, in a mere 7 hours from now.
My co-worker and former supervisor shared a cab ride home with me today. Since I live so close, I got dropped off first and then they headed on to her place. She called me not 15 minutes later after having almost been T-boned by a fire truck racing through their intersection on a red. Neither the taxi driver or my co-worker had no warning of what direction it was coming from. Apparently, the guys didn’t honk their horn as they went through. My co-worker said if they had been there even 5 seconds earlier, they would have been smoked.
