Heh

Report: Airport screeners lack training
From Mike M. Ahlers
CNN Washington Bureau

Tuesday, May 3, 2005 Posted: 2:45 PM EDT (1845 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two months after baggage screeners at the nation's busiest airport complained they were not getting required training, a congressional report released Monday is lending credence to their claim.

The report by the Government Accountability Office says many of the nation's 45,000 screeners are not getting congressionally mandated training because of staffing shortages and because many work sites don't have access to high-speed Internet training courses.

"As of October 2004, nearly half of the screener workforce did not have high-speed access to the Online Learning Center at their training facility," according to the report.

So maybe if they hadn't laid off those of us (::ahem::) who wrote the high-speed Internet training courses, and were designing/supporting its delivery infrastructure, we might not be seeing these kinds of headlines. Of course, we found out later that the TSA had much more pressing ways to spend their money, such as flower arrangements, banquets, and lifetime achievement awards (for a agency less than 5 years old).

I also can't imagine that the training is up to date. When we were writing this shtuff, changes to procedures and policies were almost hourly. The video was reshot and reshot and reshot to reflect the latest and greatest as handed down from on high. The last of the courseware was updated in May of 2004.

Well, this brouhaha explains why our old boss (since reassigned to another division of the company since the lay-off) was asked out of the blue to document our process for creating/serving/maintaining the courseware.

I can't even begin to tell you how badly the project was run on the government side, the rampant irrationality of dealing with layers of government bureaucracy, the hair-pulling insanity of it all. We once had the customer tell us in a sweeping pronouncement that the word "and" should always be preceded by a comma. Do you know how much manpower and OT went into going through sentence by sentence of on-line text to make sure every instance of the word "and" was replaced by an ", and". Nevermind the grammatical lunacy of it! My consolation throughout the whole ordeal was, "Irrational tasking or not, they are paying me very well to do this."

The project broke my health, but I paid off three credit cards. Would I do it again? Oh, hell, yeah, but only under my own terms. I cannot work 72+ hours straight anymore. I just can't. Besides, I must have WoW breaks, that's all there is to it.

I always wanted to know

...how to fold a fitted sheet