You aren’t my sunshine until you throw the ball

Greeting from stormy Ft. Lauderdale! I’ve been in America for training.

I’ve been here all week and don’t think the sun has come out more than once. As a native Floridian, I felt I should apologize to the other training participants who really thought that they were getting a trip to the Sunshine State.

When I was filling out my travel authorization, the money keeper joked that I couldn’t expense suntan lotion. I said um, it’s south Florida in fall. It’s hurricane season. Even at its best, it’s still rainy season.

Sometimes the rains have been brutal. I drove from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday and the weather was just horrific. My estimate for the drive had been maybe three hours and it came to closer to four and a half.

And I might have kicked up my mail during the trip. I have an E-Pass, but upon further review, I might not have had an *operating* E-Pass. Zippy drove down with me and we kind of realized that we hadn’t heard any beeping, which usually ensues at the little toll places.

And later, on the turnpike farther south, it turned into Sun Pass. I thought this was the same as E-Pass and continued to drive, but have since learned that they are not the same things.

How can they not be? How screwy is that? Two electronic payment methods for different parts of the same road that are not interchangeable? What year are we?

So anyway, I really fear that in a few weeks, I am going to be getting a lot of mail with bills for running toll booths. Oops. It was an honest mistake, but not one that will be fun to try and get out of.

Anyway, this training … it’s part of mandatory training, although the classes aren’t offered very often to people in my position. I was very thankful to get it, and in my first year to boot. Really, that’s unheard of. We had one person who’s been in service over 20 years (actually, now that I think about it, we had at least two) who hadn’t have the opportunity to take it.

I’d known when it would be offered and to whom it would be offered (it is once a year, but is only offered to people in my position who are serving in a particular part of the world) and had my eye out for it since I arrived at post, which was in December.

Initially, it was supposed to be in Bangkok, but there was some unrest there, so it got switched to Ft Lauderdale. I’d expressed to my supervisor my interest when I arrived and when I thought it was in Bangkok, so when I found out it was in America had been on record and got the nod. My office has three people in my position and we could only spare one, so making a point about it from early on helped my case, I think.

The training was interesting. One was personality types and how to work with them, but that confused me. It was Myers Briggs and I tested as an ISTJ, but other than the introvert part, the other three were “slight” indicators. And when we went over the different characteristics of each, I could relate to all of them. After being told it would come clearer the more we studied it, I feel I can honestly say I got more and more confused as the class went on.

One thing I was definitely strong about, though, was that people make the easiest things complicated. Some people just kept harping on made-up details.

And my God, they got hung up in the details.

We did some teamwork thing where you got in a circle and the instruction was to throw a ball across the circle to each person, with each person getting it once and then it went back to the original person. It could not touch the floor.

Those were the only directions.

Seemed simple to me. But would you believe people asked questions and for clarification for 10 solid minutes? How do we tell when someone catches the ball? How will we know if a person hasn't had the ball? Should people who've had the ball turn around? Cross their arms? What constitutes "crossing" the circle? Is there a time limit? What happens if it drops? Lots of discussion on each question plus many more. Questions I never would have thought of prompted much dialogue.

Geez, people. Don't make it complicated.

I and another person were just disgusted. The noticed and commented on having team members "disengaged." Someone asked her how to re-engage us. She was like, "ask them."

So the person asked what we should do. I was like, throw the damn ball. It's not that hard, and there's no rule that says you can't say "Hey, have you had it? I'll throw it to you next." There was no rule that you had to do it on the first try. It wasn't like we were blindfolded or something. It was easy. They just went on and on and made it so hard.

Just throw the damn ball.