I have a cold.

But first, I had a surprise birthday party which worked really well. It involved Alex, Connor*, Dave, Emma-Jean, Fiona, Gavin, Graham*, James, Jenny*, Jimbo, John, Kate, Linda, Liz, Mark, Matt, Narayan, Peta, Polly*, Rob*, Seema, Shy, Simon, Terence and my ma not letting on, and they didn’t. Then I picked up my pa from Sydney and gave him a lift home to Woy Woy, which was nice. Then I visited Mike, Jo, Nils and Koko in Sydney, and Andy came down from Townsville to visit too. We had fish and chips and birthday cake; also some of us saw The Visitor. While in Sydney I visited Nola; we went to see The 39 Steps and had dinner with Heng and Iona. Later I gave Emma-Jean a ride back to Canberra and we had a dinner party with Dave, Fiona, Gavin, Jimbo and Simon; the plat du jour was bison pie! Also, salutations to Chris F and Werner who I heard from for the first time in a long time.

Follow the time management lady.

I was to attend the second part of Operational Muppetship today. It would have revealed how to fit the remaining four and a half hours of the section about time management into a session which is already scheduled to run an hour and a half over time. However it has been rescheduled to a new timeslot after the other two sessions.

I can see where they are going with this: the other two sessions will be swapped; then one will be cancelled, the time management session will appear to be rescheduled to the vacant timeslot but will be dropped behind the table and replaced with a new session while the audience is distracted by the cancelled session being reinstated in the later timeslot; then the first and last sessions will be swapped. It will appear the time management section is now in the next session. When it turns out not to be there anybody who asks will be assured it is in one of the two later sessions. When it turns out not to be there either anybody who asks will be assured it was in one of the earlier two sessions. The fact it will have been scheduled in every session at some point, including the cancelled one, will complete the obfuscation. The half hour spent on the topic in the first session is overplaying the hand, in my opinion.

Formal informality.

From Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: “the three Rs” [informal] used to refer to the basic areas of education: reading, writing and mathematics.

*Some folk appeared courtesy of the photomontage wallpaper on my new laptop computer in my new messenger bag. Thanks everybody.  ¶ 20:23 1 comments

  Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School.

I attended an Operational Muppetship Program training course yesterday. It started poorly but I was giving it a chance. I gave up after the section about copyright and royalties and all those legal requirements which need to be met before the show can go on. Camilla discovered her facilitator’s answer sheet had not been updated so, instead of relying on her knowledge of the topic, or the knowledge of the group (which was almost entirely muppets who were just there to brush up on their skills) she declared “let’s not worry about where our permission comes from”. Then she split the class into two groups, one to make a list of skills useful for Sesame Street and the other to make a list of skills useful for Fraggle Rock, while she wandered off seething about the “bloody” answers. When she came back the lists were not discussed at all, instead we were told who was responsible for the cock up (certainly no her) and carried on to the next topic.

How to be a Successful Muppet.

The list of things to aim for to be a successful muppet was delivered as a guessing game. Camilla would prompt with “what would a successful muppet model” (positive behaviours) or “how much micro-management do muppets need” (some of them need a very, very, very little bit - no pun intended). Eventually we guessed all fifteen items on the list, eventually. The guessing game was also the method employed to deliver “Why Muppets Need Legs” (because Hitler didn’t have legs, I think) and “Muppet Motivations” where we learned getting rid of simple work was bad because the average complexity of your tasks would increase (having more time to do them was not a consideration).

Trouble with directions.

“Lift up your right foot and make a circle with it. Now write a six in the air with your other hand. See? It’s impossible.” When people disagreed Camilla clarified the circle should have been clockwise. When people demonstrated it was entirely possible Camilla suggested they probably didn’t know which way was clockwise which was okay because some people just have trouble with directions.
People also had trouble with “turn to page thirteen but don’t read it yet, like the other day”. This wasn’t helped by only having eight pages. Also, “it’s three minutes to twelve, we’ll just do this and then we can go to lunch” when everybody can see it’s already a quarter past; and “everybody write something on the list, you won’t have to speak about it” followed by “who wrote that one, tell us why you wrote that on the list” for each item. She did that twice.

Muppet types.

Operational Muppetship requires you to work with muppets who operate in different ways. To learn how to identify (but not label) differences everybody read a list of statements and ticked the ones which we “had a gut feeling about”. Camilla then tried to get people who had ticked mostly the same statements to move into groups in the corners of the rooms. She chose to do this by explaining how to orient the piece of paper with the statements so the statements you ticked would indicate the corner for you to move to - all without using potentially labelling words like “left”, “right” or “top”. She failed, and when we were finally herded into our corners she promptly assigned each group a (non-labelling) letter.
Some people recognised the letters and two people (from the D group, who were ironically not labelled “direct communicators”) took issue with their position because when they had done this before they had ended up in a different corner. Camilla explained they had not had a gut feeling about the statements they ticked, they had thought about it. This must have happened because a person cannot change their non-label. The DISC model* is based on the Classical Greek theory of the four humours. It remains constant, unlike wishy-washy ambivalent Myers-Briggs which Camilla is not authorised to administer. DISC is robust and she had been using it for years before she paid for the materials and got accreditation.
Apparently, as you practise Operational Muppetship and develop a gut feeling about statements from across all four unlabelled groups, you will maintain your original non-label. It is as constant and immutable as the theory of the four humours, even when the test originally used to not label you can no longer discriminate it. Amen.

Time management.

How did Camilla fit three Operational Muppetship Program training units totalling twelve hours into one eight hour day? She spent half an hour on a five hour unit (the time management unit, ironically enough) and declared the rest would be done on the next course (which already has two units totalling over nine hours scheduled). I hold a faint glimmer of hope Camilla will reveal the secrets of relative time dimensions at the next course; in the half hour she spent on the “Four Ds of Time Management” she came up with eight (nine if you count the one which starts with ‘I’).

*DISC models attitude, communication, habits, learning or personality depending on which word pops into Camilla’s head at the time, uncorrelated to the topic of conversation.  ¶ 19:57 7 comments

  Sleepy.

Work is not compatible with sleep.

[Insert Muppet Show analogy.]

Zzz.  ¶ 17:28 0 comments

  Odd dreams.

Printy was a large grey dove shot by an arrow, not fatally. An unidentified Asian man kept pressing his face too close to mine and smiling so much he couldn’t speak. Everybody (well, an enormous number of people) was playing basketball wearing baggy silk red, white and blue uniforms in a stadium with arc lamps. An unidentified lady caught her summery floral dress in the shredder she was leaning on while she was trying to think of a nasty nickname for a harpy who chose to drop poison bombs even though they did less damage than regular explosive ones.  ¶ 16:59 2 comments

  Slacker.

Last week I forgot to mention I went to see Dark Knight.

This week I forgot to blog.  ¶ 08:43 0 comments