Funny Training Stories Part 1

Since the unemployment rate in NJ inched up to 9.8% today, I thought it might be nice to step away from job search stories and lighten it up a bit. I have been in the Learning & Development business for a long time and have absolutely loved it. Throughout my career I have experienced the good and the bad and the funny.

A few months ago I asked some of my LinkedIn training group members for funny instructor stories. I got quite a few and none of them were the “you had to be there” type. Here they are, along with some of my own. Thank you to all who contributed.

My Stories
I had braces when I was in my twenties. My first embarrassing/funny training story happened when the rubber band attached to my orthodontics shot out of my mouth and hit a participant on his cheek, leaving a mark.

Things improved but struck again a couple of years later. I was late wrapping up a management development class and missed my flight home. After calling the office, they suggested I take a helicopter back to the airport, something I had never done before. While standing on the tarmac listening to the pilot explain where I was to sit, the propeller draft caused the skirt of my dress to fly over my head and I honestly couldn’t get it back down. I don’t know how I got into the helicopter but the hem of the dress was around my neck as I was seated and I had to listen to the snickers of the three other (male) passengers for the trip back to NJ.

Some Technology Funnies from Other Trainers
"I was supervising a group of secretaries who were producing a manual in differential equations using WordPerfect. One of them was searching for a specific symbol in the WP symbol menus using CTRL + W, and couldn't find it. "Did you try the ASCII for that character?" I asked.
"There's no ASCII on my keyboard," she replied. She thought I said "ass key"! I still chuckle at the mental picture of a key with a little butt on it!"

"When training Word, I explain that the quick way to get to the very top of your document is CTRL+Home and the quick way to get to the very bottom of your document is CTRL+END. After having several people press CTRL+N (because of the way I say it), I decided I would start spelling out the word “end.” During one class, I said, “Press CTRL and the END keys, that would be the CTRL key plus the E – N – D key.” Well, one participant thought I meant that he should press the CTRL, the E, the N, and the D keys – all four at the same time."

"Maybe 14 years ago, I was teaching a database programming course and everyone had to connect to my instructor machine to run queries and execute the programs. Students were complaining that they couldn't connect, so I spent a lot of time that morning walking around to the student workstations, troubleshooting the client software, pinging other machines, etc. One of the other trainers came in, and when I asked him what might be wrong, he walked over, looked at my instructor machine, and handed me the unconnected network cable with a wry smile. OOOOF! What could I do? Meekly I just shrugged my shoulders and said "By the way, the most important thing you can do when troubleshooting your network is to check that you are, indeed, connected to it."

"Early in my career, when PCs had just become more mainstream, a bunch of mainframe programmers were sent to our company to learn PC programming. One of the students actually held the mouse in his hand and talked into it. He said "double click" and other commands but was getting nowhere."

"At the instruction to place his mouse over a particular button, a student picked up the computer mouse and literally placed it over the button on the computer screen. Thankfully, my trainer maintained his composure and calmly explained to the gentleman that he should move his mouse along the desk to place the cursor on the screen in particular places."

Next time we’ll hear from the leadership development and soft skills trainers. If you have any stories about the funny things that happened to you while you were training, I'd love to hear from you.