I have been stuck in a room for five days with a trainer who looks like John Cleese, talks like the Chuckle Brothers but is about as funny and entertaining as having a toe nail pulled off with a wrench. My fellow course attendees were a bunch of odd balls and wierdos.
Tina the Technical Writer
Nice girl but desperate to prove that she belongs in a male world. She sounds like she has a really nice job. At the interview, the two guys interviewing shouted abuse and hurled insults at her for five minutes to see if she could cope with the "pressure". How nice.
Fat Boy Slim
When we sat down for the three hour exam on his desk was a Yorkie, a box of jelly babies, some Dairy Milk minatures, a bag of Tesco finest cookies, some salt and shake crisps, barbecue spare ribs, Kung-po chicken with fried rice and a DIET coke.
Although when the pizza delivery guy showed up after an hour, that really was taking it too far.
The Quiet Man
Hmmm, it took me three days to notice that this guy was actually in our class.
He sat at the back drinking evil red bull and not doing anything.
Until the quiet man finally found his voice and came top of the class in the first exam. Maybe I should've been paying attention like him.
Wide Boy
The sort of fella who wears shorts over the knee and whose idea of complimenting his Girlfriend is walking up to a stranger in a bar and saying "Are you looking at my bird?" "No" "Why not because she's gorgeous".
He wasn't very interested in learning either.
"So if I need 50% overall to pass and the questions worth 15 marks and I get five marks for drawing a rectangle, a circle, a rhombus and joining them up with lines then all I need is to write three key words and I'll have passed?"
City Short Girl
Well the course wouldn't be complete without the sterotypical girl would it. She asked questions at every single possible point searching desperately for confirmation that she'd understood it. Convinced she'd done terribly in the mock exam until she got the second highest score in the class, certain she'd failed the first exam until the moment that she got her results and absolutely positive that she'd failed the final exam even though she was the only one in the class that had any previous experience in this field and was studying for about 1200 hours before the exam.
And what's more interesting is that she had really huge hips but actually looked good in those horrible city shorts.
Scouser
Eh Calm Down! Calm Down! Now I'm not into any racial stereotyping but I'm glad I didn't drive in because I'd be worried about my hubcaps. And I'm not saying all scousers are thick but this was his second attempt to pass the course. He even tried to bribe the examiner by offering him a cathedral, since they've got one spare.
In fact he was the spitting image of that guy who said "Meh-der?" on that real life police show that was set in Liverpool.
And 'dat scouse wit, eh? He thought it'd be funny to come in with a Liverpool shirt on every day and go on and on about how they've won five european cups.
City of Culture my arse.
And me, well we were on the 9th floor in Salford Quays and I spent five days wondering what would happen if the side of the building I was leaning against fell off. I also watched the Eccles trams driving around and even nearly saw two of them run into each other. Which is pretty amazing as there are only about 3 eccles trams running at any one time.