- BORING:

You don't know boring until you've sat through a "Records Archive Conference". I know that the word "Diaster" sounds like it might make for an interesting lecture, but please take my word for it, it doesn't.

How can someone sit through a 4 hour workshop like this and act like they're interested? I hope you're not expecting me to answer that because I seriously wish someone will tell me because I haven't been able to figure it out yet.

Let me explain something to you. When you work for the city, you experience a type of speech which I've yet to encounter anywhere else. The only thing I can compare it to is something like "Doublespeak," which I think is a term in Orwell's novel, "1984". It's basically speaking to someone and not making sense, but being able to sound like you're making perfect sense. It confuses the person you're speaking to but not enough to have them question it or ask you to repeat yourself.

You end up leaving a meeting or conversation, not quite sure what you're supposed to do except set up another meeting in a few days to replay the entire scene. OF course this doesn't happen everyday, but it really does occur more often than you would believe.

So an example of this confusion happened at that workshop training I attended a few days ago. The woman giving the lecture is a very nice intelligent woman but a few times she whipped out the crazy talk.

The first occurance was when a young woman asked a question which stopped the lecturer mid sentence making her all excited as she answered it, "Yes yes this is what I'm talking about, what a great question." She repeated the question that the young woman had asked and thanked her for asking the question.

But when she was done speaking she never actually answered the question which was asked. She had totally confused everyone and especially the girl who asked the original question, who kinda sat there with a look on her face as if to say, "What the hell just happened?"

I realized the question was never answered and I know the girl did too.. but I honestly don't think anyone else realized it and there was literally 20 adults older than me in the room.

The second time occured about 10 minutes later when the lecturer was speaking. She had finished a section of material and said, "You know exactly what I'm talking about because your department deals with that all the time." She then pointed to a man who looked at her with a curious look. After seeing him starring back at her with a dumbfounded look she nodded and said, "Yes yes exactly like your division." The guy pointed a finger at himself and squinted his eyes while starting to slowly shake his head NO, realizing she had mistaken him for someone else. But she had already moved on and started speaking on a new topic.