A couple of weeks ago, an AS/400 plopped itself into my server room. Unfortunately, neither my partner-in-crime nor myself know enough about AS/400’s to even log into the thing. The government agreed we can’t support something we don’t understand, and agreed to pay for a trainer to come out on-site to train us.
Class was supposed to start at 8:30am; the trainer was supposed to arrive a half hour early. My wife (who coordinated the event) started calling the guy around 8:30am to find out where he was. “I’m on my way!” he responded. It was a bad omen.
Waiting in the classroom were fifteen students. One guy had used an AS/400 five years ago. My wife and her co-worker have logged into the machine a few times. I came in fourth place in “AS/400 knowledge” from having leaned against the machine once. No one else in the room had ever seen or used one.
At 8:50am, the instructer comes into class, empty-handed. No handouts, no curriculum, no Powerpoint presentation, no nothing. After the obligitory “who are you/why are you here” opening round of questions, he opened his presentation with the question, “so what do you want to know?”
For ten minutes or so the guy rambled on about different command line options. No one in the room had any idea what he was talking about. When he finally stopped and asked if there were any questions, one co-worker asked, “What IS an AS/400?” Sometimes when people stop dead in their tracks and pause for a minute I joke that their brain “rebooted”. This guy definitely rebooted. After stammering around for almost five minutes (most of which were dead silence), he came up with, “it’s kind of hard to explain.” At that point it was decided it might be a good idea for the guy to take a ten minute break.
Most of us spilled out into the hall, a bit bewildered. Apparently at this point the guy started telling my wife all he needed was a few hours back at his hotel to “whip up a Powerpoint presentation.” Susan told him to keep on truckin’ and try and make it through the day.
After we resumed after the break, the guy decided it might be a good idea for everyone to come down to the basement and see our AS/400. This was really a bad idea due to the placement of our AS/400 — it’s two feet away from a wall, facing it. There’s no way 15 people could see the screen — maybe two or three, tops. So as people began piling into the server room, several people got stuck on the other side of the 7′ tall racks. Some of the people couldn’t even see the instructor, much less the screen. Our server room is also very windy (due to two massive air conditioning units) and very cold (it stays around 66 degrees), so after just a few minutes the instructor decided we should all go back upstairs — but not before he started asking about formatting tapes. “Can I format this tape?” he asked, looking at me. *shrug*. Then Paul (Susan’s co-worker) chimed in and informed the guy we only had one good tape backup of the 400, and that might be it. I went off in search of a blank tape while the crowd migrated back upstairs.
By this point in time Susan had split off from the party and was calling the instructor’s company. He had been provided a curriculum, a slideshow, handouts, and all kinds of stuff, but apparently not only didn’t bring them, but was trying to “wing it” (and failing miserably). Back in the training room, the guy showed us a few commands by creating himself a couple of administrator accounts (which I thought was odd) and showing us seemingly random and unconnected commands. “Here’s how you check your CPU usage. Here’s how to look at a tape. Here’s how you delete a user.” You could literally see the question marks hovering above people’s heads.
At around 9:45, about an hour into the training, the instructor whispered to Susan, “I need to go home and do a Powerpoint.” At that point Susan stood up, addressed the classroom, and announced, “this class is officially cancelled.”
The rest of Susan’s afternoon has been spent dealing with management and the instructor’s company. I guess what was finally decided was the company is flying out another (and hopefully more prepared) instructor tomorrow to start over (that is, if anyone will actually return to the training room).
An AS/400? Uh…wow. My condolences. I haven’t used one of those in years! I think it was at the station in Green Bay, the last time I ran into one. Slow, slow, slow. Our traffic department used it to generate the station logs with the detailed rundowns of which commercials and promos ran during which breaks in which shows, etc. etc.; I’d have to get on the machine at least once a day to manually insert my promo numbers. (Wow, that sounded bad.)
It’s a slow, slow beast. Just be ready for that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a machine in a desktop casing (or sometimes a rackmount), but it’s so slow that you can’t help but envision something like…well…ENIAC. Or the home of the WOPR from “Wargames.” I didn’t even know they were still making the thing. Or, for that matter, that the people training end users on how the use them could get away with staggering around training like the spent the whole previous night at the nudie bar. :lol:
Well, the training surprisingly took a positive upswing. The new trainer obviously has a stronger background in marketing/sales, and came in with a smile (and training materials). The other instructor came back as well, to “audit” the class. I think it was a small case of “unprepared” mixed with a big case of nerves. I’ve talked to both guys offline since Tuesday and they’re both actually pretty personable.