Day 1 of training

I survived.

Barely.

A long day.  I was at the site at 7:20 am, 40 minutes before class started.  I had to wander around the outside of the building until I found someone inside who could let me in.  I got the room ready before anyone arrived.  I also stopped on the way at a grocery store and bought some snacks and goodies for people to munch on.  Also some healthy food.

I was suppose to have 15 people attend the class.  14 showed up.  The 15th (and missing) person was another person trained in taking fingerprints.  Darn!  That meant I had to do it.

Fingerprinting had me wishing my Uncle Larry was here. Uncle Larry I need you!!!!  Fingerprinting the old fashioned (pre-digital) way is hard.  Especially when people do not have the flexibility to roll their arm and fingers to get a full print.  I had a number of "re-dos".   The other experienced person who took fingerprints was confident going into the fingerprint session but had as much or more trouble than I.

It took well over two hours for us to fingerprint the nine new-hire people, and we finished the last person right at 4:30 pm when we had to leave the building.

Another challenge we had was our ink pads were pretty dry.  Almost always the problem in the past has been too much ink.  We had trouble getting enough ink.  I even called the Columbia Falls police department to see if I could borrow an extra fingerprint ink pad of theirs.  Nope.   One of my team found that the ranger station we were training at had an extra ink pad that we could use.  Imagine that!  I would have never guessed.

The fingerprints have been Fed Ex'd and it will be interesting to find out how good or bad of a job I did.

Another challenge was the ranger station mistakenly double booked the room all four days we had it.  I just fit all of my team into the room and now, a few hours into my class, the station manager was asking me to squeeze into half the room so they could close the divider and let the other group use half the room.

What?!

I looked at the room with the building manager and asked how I could do that?  I supposed I could put all the tables together and everyone would have to walk sideways when moving about the tables to reach a door as there was no space left.

She said she would think about it and when we took our lunch break in an hour we would rearrange the room.

*sigh*

But a short time later, as I was lecturing, she slid a sheet under the door telling me "never mind".  I could have all of the room all week.

*whew*  Another crisis averted.

After having an early breakfast I never ate until 7 pm after I got home.   I had to verify and sign all the documents the people filled out in the morning.  Pages and pages.  I also had to verify their id documents, either a passport or two other forms of id such as a driver's license and social security card.  It took me all lunch hour to do so between the questions people asked me.

One woman brought me back a Burger King cheeseburger but I had no time to eat it.  I microwaved it to warm it back up after I got home.

Due to the time it took to fingerprint people the other people waiting to be fingerprinted had to wait.  Some more patiently than others.

Organized chaos at time.  Manged insanity at others.  With boring paperwork and dull reading mixed in.