I've found the last two days to be a real chore. Not only have I had to listen to speaker after speaker talking about "win/win", "competitive advantage" and "collaborative business intelligence". It's been far worse than that - it was expected that I give a ten minute presentation along the same lines to the rest of the class. We all had to do it. Now, that's fine if you're in sales, like most people in the class. But the reason I'd been asked to take the class was so that I could understand the sales people, not so that I'd have to ape being one! When I realized that I was going to have to do this presentation, my heart just sank.

I think most of the trainers in the class probably ended up thinking I was a troublemaker. I was practically the only person who ever disagreed with anything that was said in class. Take one exercise - we had to form into groups of five and put together an "I believe" statement, wherein we explained why we believed in our company. I was the only person in the whole room who argued that reusing the same set of business jargon was liable to leave our statements sounding hollow and all but inaudible. You can only listen to so many sentences using phrases like "building value-trust relationships" without your eyes glazing over.

But I was wasting my time. Of course when you're so thoroughly in the minority school of thought, you have to question why. I found it inconceivable that I could be wrong, and yet everyone else disagreed with me. It's one of those times when you think that maybe you came from a different planet.

And I completely disagreed with the chief trainer's values. She thought it made sense for us to follow up nine hours of class yesterday with three to four hours of homework, and then have us return to class today exhausted after insufficient sleep. When I complained about the amount of homework, the teacher said something about "you get out of it what you put into it", which left me feeling very small. Last night, I cursed my introspective nature which at times leaves me spending my evenings hashing through all these things endlessly. Believe it or not, being able to write about it hear actually helps!

This morning was the time for delivering our presentations - infomercials as they accurately called them. I struck out on my own, because the approach we were asked to take was not one that I felt comfortable with. I was probably perceived to have performed weakest. Like I cared!

Despite all of my whining, I did actually get a lot out of the class yesterday. I can finally understand my sales colleagues when they go on about an SSO being inside the funnel. Isn't that an achievement?

I was out of class by 12.00 noon, and managed to get on a much earlier flight than planned, so I was soon on my way home. What's more, I've no flights reserved anywhere else, for the moment! The clouds were beautiful as we approached San Francisco.

The clouds from 39,000 feet

When I got home, it was still light, but I was entirely wiped out. I'd only slept four hours the night before. I was completely happy to have a quiet evening at home watching some things I'd recorded on the VCR. I feel like I hardly know what it's like to be home anymore!