Not your circus, not your monkeys.

This gives me a chance to (re)tell the story of my experiences with those from the Great Subcontinent.

The year is 2008. I was working in a 4-person group of MS Exchange administrators. Our employer (a three-letter entity with a blue logo) informed me and my workmate (an elderly greybeard fellow that taught me all there was to know about Exchange at this work site) that we were "too expensive to employ" and that our new work duties were to "train" our eventual replacements, who we later learned were two individuals from the Great Subcontinent. We were to be given a severance check as a final payment as reward for this endeavor which was several weeks of pay at once.

We were given an Excel workbook with an extensive list of duties to teach these two individuals. Upon reviewing the document, my workmate, (to be known from here on as $GB), said to me: "Hey $mailboy79, this list is pretty extensive, how are we going to teach them our Exchange practices in four weeks?"

I calmly told him:

$GB, we can teach them all we want, but that doesn't guarantee that they are going to actually learn anything, does it? So just check the boxes off of this form as you go along, and make sure that you sign it, so that on quitting day, you get paid. Understand?

$GB: That's brilliant, $mailboy79! I never would have figured it out in quite that way.

$GB got to teach them some Exchange-related practices, but his particular trainee never really asked the type of questions that a "Windows Server Administrator" might ask if he was in a new environment.

I was tasked to teach my trainee how to build "Conference Rooms" (essentially shared mailboxes with an auto-attendant that staff used to schedule meetings with shared space) and to ensure that they knew the "best practices" for handling disaster recovery procedures in the organization. For the DR stuff, they had to attend and observe a series of four meetings with stakeholders present.

The first DR meeting comes... and goes... they fail to attend. I call one of them up on the telephone to find out "what happened":

$mailboy79: So $bozo1, why did you miss the DR meeting? I had about a dozen people lined up and waiting to meet you.

$bozo1: I was busy with $bozo2 doing "important stuff" (NGL)

$mailboy79: "It is vitally important that you attend these meetings. If you come in to them unprepared, you are going to be facing many unhappy people."

$bozo1: I'm so sorry...

To cut a long story short, both $bozo1 and $bozo2 missed the next three meeting instances. I called $bozo1 on the telephone after the final DR meeting had concluded:

$mailboy79: "$bozo1, I need to know why you have not attended any of these important DR meetings! You have missed your final opportunity to meet with the stakeholders before I am gone from this place forever."

$bozo1: "Well, $bozo2 and me were hoping that you could set up a special meeting to meet these people privately."

$mailboy79: That's not going to happen. These are not IT staff. The have actual work to do for their employer and don't have the time for special meetings for you two."

$bozo1: "Oh, I guess we should have attended those meetings then."

$mailboy79: "Yup. goodbye."

Beyond this, I was specifically tasked with training $bozo1 on how to create the Conference Rooms mentioned previously. He failed to appear for several scheduled training opportunities, so I set about making full-scale documentation complete with pictograms, procedures, diagrams, and the like.

At 3:20 PM on my last scheduled working day, $bozo1 calls my telephone:

$bozo1: "I had a question..."

$mailboy79: "What's the question, $bozo1?"

$bozo1: "How do you build a Conference Room?"

$mailboy79: "I'd strongly advise you to consult the documentation i wrote on that topic. If you don't know what to do after reading it, contact our manager. If you don't know what to do after that, call our supervisor, and if you don't know what to do after that, call the director. If you do not know what to do after making this series of telephone calls, I don't know what to tell you because it is 3:30 on a Friday, and my work day is over. Goodbye."

I met up with $GB and asked him how it went with $bozo2. He indicated that the poor slob was clueless.

When I turned in my company property to get my check from our line manager, it was the closest that I had seen any man cry outside of my immediate family. He didn't know what to do now that we were leaving.

We later learned that $bozo1 and $bozo2 spent their time in the company cafeteria babbling in Hindi to others from the Great Subcontinent. They were "fired" shortly after I left, and the worksite was run into the ground to the cost of multimillions of dollars.

True story.