The Long Journey
I had a small training course that I attended to today. My manager told me to sign up for a CorasWorks workshop and that she and her manager would also be attending.
I printed out the directions before I left work yesterday and saw that it would take roughly 50 minutes. Due to my comming into work late a few times, I figured I should try and get there early and meet them before the workshop starts. I gave myself 40 extra minutes.
So I left home just before 7AM today and made the long journey. As soon as I got on the highway, I was immediately reminded why I hated leaving for work before 9AM. Most of it was just me not moving. A 4 mile stretch of highway took me over an hour to get to my exit.
My estimate is that I was traveling at an average speed of about 12 miles per hour. I was late. Very late. I was considering just forgetting about it and going into work instead. I decided to press on and go with it anyway. I arrived 1 hour late.
When I arrived, everyone was still introducing themselves with who they were and what they did. I found a seat and was happy when another person arrived late about 10 minutes after me.
As far as the workshop goes, it was ok. I was learning much about Microsoft SharePoint Portal and CorasWorks. The server that everyone was working on continued to give us problems throughout the day when we all hit it at the same time. My main beef with the product is that it is very hard to navigate. The instructor told us that there are navigations parts that can help with this issue.
Towards the end, the server pretty much died and the instructor had to demo the “hands-on” workshop to everyone from his sandbox on his network. Talk about having a bad day. This guy must have been very embarassed, but he kept cool and didn’t miss a beat.
Lesson for today: Always multiply the estimated time by three during rush hour commutes.
Tags: Training, Work, CorasWorks, Manager, Directions, Late, Workshop, Long, Long Journey, Journey, Highway, 9AM, Microsoft, SharePoint Services, SharePoint, Windows SharePoint Services, WSS, SPS, Microsoft SharePoint, Hands-On, Commute