I have finished my second day of training with the USPS.  Today I got up before 6:00 am to make it to the training site by 8:00.  It was raining and it was dark.  It's been more than a year since I've had to do anything so horrific.

Training has gone fairly well so far.  There are 8 of us in the class.  I sit in the front row.  Not that I'm a kiss-up or anything.  I just want to get the most of out the class that I can.  Really.  On the first day I quickly became the teacher's pet when the projector connected to her computer wouldn't work.  She fiddled with it for 15 minutes and it was all I could do to sit there and watch without butting in.  Seriously.  I had a knot in my stomach while I watched her.  The sound would not work and to fix it she turned off the projector.  And still I sat there.  Arrghh.  She finally looked up from the equipment and asked if anyone knew how it worked.  I jumped at the opportunity and had it working in less than a minute.  All I did was press the "pc" button on the projector to tell it to connect.  Nothing technical at all.

Later she gave her computer password to her boss so that he could access her e-mail while she was gone.  The ex-network administrator in me almost exploded.  To make it worse she was making fun of my reaction today and gave ME her password.  This caused me great stress.  Also today I got a finger waggle and she said like me, she used to be loud and controlling - in a good way.  Harumph.

Despite the antics I managed to learn a lot.  That's good because there is a surprisingly lot to learn.  Our instructor says the job is hard and she guarantees that at some point we'll cry.  She even pointed to the one male in our class (an ex-military fellow) and promised that even he would cry.  I wonder.  I understand there is stress and the job is hard but I just don't believe that it can be more stressful or frustrating than it was to sit in the middle of a computer room floor at 5:00 in the morning with the main server in pieces around you, the clock ticking, having not slept in 22 hours, knowing that in a few more hours the first of 300 people are coming into the office expecting to turn on their computers and access their files... I cried then.  I think it's all perspective.

I still have a long way to go before I get to actually begin working.

Tomorrow I attend a 1/2 day of driver training on one of these:

I take a test in Seattle on Thursday.  Saturday I do a "ride-along".  Next week I have 3 days of  "Rural Academy" followed by several days of on the job training.  Somewhere around mid-November I get to actually go out on my own and the crying can commence.