Finally, A Small But Much Needed Break….

If you are a regular here, you must have read my last post SMC, you would be knowing that after a continuous 6 days of work and a mere Sunday off, there was a grilling week which was waiting for me. Gladly, that week is over and not just over but with a  great satisfaction too came when I was closing the session.

As I said couple of times by now, I had an expectation that the last week would be really hectic. And as like always with me, any wrong/bad feeling that I get into my mind, does come true so the same actually happened as well. When I reached to the office(and I reached very early, 8am itself) , I saw that the whole setup was different from the past sessions that I had taken and due to a change in the policy, I can’t access the support documents for it anymore as well. You can imagine from this that in how much tension I came after seeing this that while I was sitting in an centrally air-conditioned room, drops of sweat came over my forehead right away. I tried to check couple of things, called a support technician and did understand the details. After almost two hours of struggling, I finally was able to finish the setup that was going to happen in the entire day. Did I mention that I yet had to start the session? Yes, I still hadn’t started the session and all the delegates were already sitting and waiting for me to start. I got 30 minutes late in the starting of the session but still, I was confident enough that all is going to work well since I had already tested it. Can’t say that being late was a great start but still, it was much better than being clueless!

The entire week was very tiring. The module which I was conducting, is called “accelerated module” as its a combined session of two different modules where one is for 4 days and another for 3 days. So in total, both the sessions are of 7 days in total but the session that I was conducting, its a combined session of 5 days. Yes 7 days worth talk in 5 days only! So you can imagine that how tough it would had been for me to finish the entire module and that too without leaving anything from it. And it was not much of a problem for me than it was for the delegates since they were being pushed by me to finish the practices quickly so that we could go ahead with the session. And this still wasn’t so bad if you ask me. There was something more worse than this which was there IMO.

The session,which I was teaching was a new course. Now, with the latest release of any course, its expected that it would be more refined and would bring more information for the delegates who would attend it. But the thing with this course of mine was, there was a lot of talk in it about many other, new things but not that much information was there for which anyone would actually come and join it. Definitely, things discussed in it were new and it was important for the delegates to understand them as well. But more than that information, the delegates (and anyone who would come for the same course) were more inclined to know about the last topic of the course since that’s what the course should had been all about in the first place. The older version of the course was actually had a lot of information about the said topic but the new one didn’t have much. And being one who had taught three different releases of the same course, I was completely able to understand where the delegates were coming from about their mentioning of this feedback about the course. But, for something, you have no other choice but to accept them the way they are handed over to you and that’s the same which I told to the delegates. Fortunately, they did understand and accept my reply and with the extra references that I shared with them, I hope they would be able to bridge the gap by themselves. The delegates were extremely good, friendly and passionate about the entire course. I had a great time (as like always) talking to them about the entire thing and also did share with them, a lot of references, names of the big shots of Oracle community and books which I thought would help them on their learning path. All the delegates, when we closed the session, had a smile on their face and as I say always, that’s a sign (and a real important one) that they were happy from me and from whatever I discussed with them in the session. Thanks so much guys for so kind words of yours, for your patience and co-operation. I hope and wish that I shall meet you all very soon either in some other program or whenever I shall be next at Banglore.

There wasn’t anything much exciting that did happen in my journey back to home except this that my flight got late by two hours and this happened with this particular airline company now for the 5h time. I am sure that we won’t be using this airline anymore in the future. We were told that it is possible that the flight may get cancelled as well but fortunately, it didn’t happen and I was able to reach Delhi. After a long and tiring night travel, first with a cab and then with a bus, I made it to home. After a grueling 2 week’s of work, that’s the best place to be to get myself together. And since my sister Gunjan is also visiting home for few days, I can’t ask for anything better to make myself happy, can I :) ?