The Unknown

When I conduct trainings at a new venue, there are sometimes unknown variables involved such as projection equipment (or lack thereof) or computer setups. Occasionally, these minor impediments cause problems.

Today was one with impediments. I went to conduct an Outlook training session for some county employees. The room we used is not where they usually work and all were supposed to have existing Outlook accounts accessible from the computers in this room. I also requested a trainer email account so I could email back and forth with the participants.

As I got settled in before the training, we realized several of the participants would have to have accounts set up on these computers. Also my email account was not quite functional so when we finally settled down to start sending some emails, my new email message had no send button!

I was a tad flummoxed, thinking how in world can you NOT have a SEND button? From my perch in the center of the room, I tried not to look panicked but inside my head all the alarms were going off. It turns out since my email account was not yet functional, the send feature was disabled by the system. Kudos to one of the savvy participants who kindly pointed this out.

We got a at least a couple of good hours out of the session but I had to pull a bunch tricks out of my ways-to-teach-when-things- go-awry arsenal.

Tomorrow should be much easier...