Uncle…Uncle…UNCLE

“Hey Dan,” my boss says to me one day, “I got an email on this upcoming class on .NET WCF Mastery that’ll be coming up in October.  That’s your thing, right?  You want to go?”

That more or less paraphrases the events that got me to California this week.  I looked over the class description, thought it sounded intriguing, and decided to take the company up on its offer for some training.

I’m not going to say that it was a mistake to say yes.  I don’t know that any technical professional…or anyone really…should turn up their nose at the opportunity to pursue training, especially when your company is willing to pay for it.  What’s more, the class is being taught by one of the top software developers in the world.  It’s covering a topic that I’m interested in and have pushed for in our software development group.

After one day, however, I’m quite convinced that I might just die by the end of the week.

I’ve never walked into a class where the instructor spent probably the first 20 – 30 minutes basically telling us that we were all…screwed.  He was going to push the boundaries of the amount of material that a person could possibly absorb in a 5 day class.  He might even go beyond.  We’d be spending 8 – 10 hours each day going over material, doing labs, and apparently crying over our broken wrists and fingers. 

The picture at the top of this post?  It’s the power point presentations he prepared for the class.  1400 slides, printed two to a page, double sided.  The mouse is in the picture for reference.  The thing stands 3 – 4 inches tall.  I think we get about an hour and a half of official breaks per day, including lunch.

I’m hoping I make it through this week.  Today we ran about 20 minutes over.