Why should I learn by ORAL tradition? Where's the DOCUMENTATION?

Peace, make spears silent for a time, But not long

The initial user response to the next round of corporate training, however, has a different ring to it. Despite the usual nervousness about the changeover, it seems that everyone is looking forward to the training. What’s so different about this project?

If there’s anything worse than being bullied by your boss into taking training days away from your desk, only to return to shitloads of work that simply piled up in your absence, it’s being offered no training at all. This, it turns out, is exactly what most of the users received at the last roll-out.

Hang on, I’m thinking, the software they’re currently using is quite powerful and complex. Its interface is unintuitive and its menus are non-standard and unintelligible. It has both a Search command and a separate Find command, which look entirely different, operate entirely differently and do entirely different things. Most of the other menus are greyed out and remain so, no matter what you do.

I have never located a user guide for this system and as for the Help ... it isn’t much. How the heck does anyone learn how to use it?

It turns out that at the original roll-out of that old CMS, sometime during the first millennium by the look of it, a handful of senior people received the necessary training, on the understanding that they would subsequently train their underlings themselves. It is possible that they might even have done so.

Since then, however, none of the original trainees still works at the company, nor indeed do any of their underlings, nor their descendants, servants or livestock. No-one for generations, it would appear, has received any formal training, nor is there any documentation.

As a result, learning how to use one of the most important software systems at the company has become an oral tradition passed from one hapless employee to the next. When a casual shift worker turns up for the first time, he must approach the Tent Cubicle of the CMS Elders and sit around a campfire to hear a wizened office Gandalf recite obscure GREP expressions from cultural memory.

It is like Beowulf but more violent. Some employees run screaming from the tent. Others are driven mad by the horror and spend the rest of the day sprawled out on beanbags in the office break-out pods, dribbling and in a near-catatonic state.

The worst-affected are the most terrifying: they return to their desks and do their best to hack their way through the old system’s undocumented UI disaster zone. Their jovial banter has been silenced. The glint in their eyes has died out. Offers to make rounds of tea and coffee have ceased. They will never be the same again.

Over at customer services – that is, The Artist Formerly Known as IT Support – things have been growing tense as only a couple of people, themselves contractors, know how any of the old system works. The last person to know how it ALL works was laid to rest back in the 15th Century and his weather-worn tombstone can be visited at St Albans cathedral.

So for the first time in my professional experience, I am facing a queue of corporate Tiggers eager to be retrained in a replacement system. They can’t wait.

I confidently expect my heroic exploits over the next few months to be immortalised in epic poetry. As they struggle to get to grips with ancient browser-based database access, future civilisations will sing my name in admiration and dread. ®