Safety Training

I am sick puppy…. this morning I was sitting in my compulsory safety training session which I had to be at by 7.30 am, scanning the men in the room, thinking who I would have sex with. There were a few actually surprisingly. That occupied about five minutes. This was my seventh, annual torture session. It gets even more boring and mundane each year. This year I came well prepared and armed with lots of things to keep me busy and pass the time quickly. I handwrote in a notebook with pen and paper, this and several other blog entries. I had a book of poems by W. H. Auden, that I have been meaning to read more carefully for ages. A novel by James Riordan titled, The Prisoner. Half a baguette with roast lamb, Swiss cheese and horseradish, also nestled in my bag in case hunger struck. I considered bringing my laptop and headphones but that probably would have been too obvious a clue that I wasn’t paying a scrap of attention for the whole four hours. As an educator, the whole session is a waste of time. I know safety is important but the teaching staff do not have access to any of the areas that the training is about. Second, no one can sit in one place for that length of time and listen to a lecture session, even with a few digital videos thrown in. Non-native English speakers have gradually replaced the presenters and it’s even harder to listen, because their command of the language albeit admirable, is not easy to listen to. But I made it through this year. I quite enjoyed the time because I was quite productive. There was a test at the end of it all and that was a cinch – most of the responses were D. A colleague who attended the week before told us that.