Ooh, where to start?
Right - first one, from the job I've just left.

Bit of background: I'm an IT Trainer for the NHS, I train all kinds of staff on all kinds of systems - mostly clinical , but occasionally Word, Excel, that kind of thing.

You've probably heard of the troubles the NHS is having with its computer modernisation; anyway, as part of that program we implemented a new system, which we called PAS.

This involved training a couple of thousand staff prior to going live with the system, then supporting them through go-live, followed by training of the ones we didn't get before going live.

As well as this, there were other systems which also needed to be trained, as staff would have to use them too.

There were 5 trainers, and one, who I'll call "The Hammer" (for that was her nickname amongst us) was not only a sneaky 2-faced bitch, but also stupid and incompetent, as well as set in her ways and a control freak.

She was (for some insane reason) temporarily made up to a higher band than the 4 other trainers and called "Training Project Lead", which theoretically meant she was in charge of us.

She never did any actual leading, anything that required a decision was referred down to the 4 of us, and if our actual manager told her to get one of us to do something, she always told us through a third person. We eventually realised that this was so she always had a get out ("why didn't Kenny do those spreadsheets?" "Well, I told Miranda to tell him they had to be done", etc).

She constantly ignored what our manager told her, for instance in the run up to go-live we were all told by the head of IT that although PAS was important, it wasn't the only system we were training and not to forget the other systems. On leaving the meeting, she turned round to us all and proclaimed "I don't care what he says, PAS is all we're doing".

At that same meeting the head of IT said that prior to being officially trained on PAS we could all have a practise on it with the laptop that had been supplied with it loaded on, so that we had a bit of a headstart. We didn't even know this laptop existed, as she'd hidden it in her desk and not told us - that way she could be the only one who knew anything about it and could make us all look lazy and/or stupid.

She couldn't be trusted, she was always talking about people behind their backs, including when one trainer got pregnant telling her off for having such bad timing and then constantly telling people that although she was pregnant, she shouldn't be showing a bump yet and was in fact just very fat - she herself being as rounded and wobbly as a round wobbly thing.

She was also incompetent at most things computer related - I had to freeze and unfreeze panes for her on Excel, every time she needed this doing - no matter how many times I showed her the two mouse-clicks it took to do this she forgot again - oh, and once I overheard her telling a trainee that the reason the copy/paste operation she'd just carried out hadn't worked properly was because she'd not clicked "Paste" hard enough (nothing to do with the fact that she'd selected the wrong block of text then?).

I could go on all night, but this is long enough. The worst of it is that the 4 of us were a really good training team, and now that I've left, The Hammer is the only one left. I actually changed jobs because I moved to Derby, but the other 3 left because she drove them away.

/penis
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Wed 30 Jan 2008, 22:33, Reply)