#work quiz

[praisesatanitsfriday]

When you work with a bunch of amazing crazy people and th expect you to dress up for a work quiz.

[deskjockeyshorts]

Another quiz? When did I re-enroll in school?

I just had to take another quiz for work. This one was about our data-protection policy. Now, I have done a lot of pointless exercises in this job, but I can't remember anything more futile than this. Let me take you through it. We received a message about this quiz, and this message included a link to some training materials that we were supposed to read before the quiz. It was no big deal - just 11 PowerPoint slides. Granted, it wasn't interesting, but it was easy enough to comprehend.

Then I clicked on the link to take the quiz. Let me take you back to when you were 16 or 17 and you were taking the SAT or ACT. You would usually find questions like this one.

An eastbound train leaves Denver at 4:30 PM traveling at 45 miles per hour. Another train heading westward leaves Chicago at 5:12 PM traveling at 53 miles per hour. Which train is carrying more lumber?

Naturally, your response was, "What kind of stupid f@#*ing question is that?" Well, whoever wrote the questions for this must have experience writing questions for college-entrance exams. This quiz about our data-protection policy had no correlation whatsoever to the "training materials." Yet somehow, we all have to score 70% or better within five attempts to pass this quiz. I imagine that if you can't pass it within five attempts, you're sentenced to the work equivalent of detention: a four-hour PowerPoint presentation (given by a terminally-dull person who actually finds this rubbish interesting) training you about all the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of our data-protection policy. I did pass it on the second attempt, but guess what. My understanding of the data-protection policy is not any better because I passed the quiz. In fact, I've already forgotten anything I was supposed to learn from this exercise.

This is the height of the absurd. One of the things we hear constantly around our office is that we "don't have the resources." Yet we always seem to find the resources for junk like this. So, let me give a little pop quiz of my own.

Requiring employees to take quizzes just so some employee can meet his or her quarterly goals is stupid and pointless. A. True B. False

[deskjockeyshorts]

Efficiency? Never heard of it.

I went online at work yesterday to take the ISO quiz required of all employees. Not surprisingly, I didn't remember my password to log in to the site where I need to take the quiz. I mean, of all the 38,148 passwords in my life (I'm sure George Carlin would have something to say about that), the one for work training is probably the one I'm least likely to remember. I mean, that piece of information is as important as knowing your mother-in-law's birthday. So I clicked the forgot password link, thinking that I would be redirected to some page where I could reset my password. What I got was an email stating, "Unfortunately passwords can not be reset on this site, please contact the site administrator."

Let me see if I've got this straight. The only reason I went to this training site is that I have to take this ISO quiz that you say is vital for all employees. Only I need the assistance of someone - in Singapore - to reset my password so I can take the quiz (which really measures nothing) that I would like to skip. Ah, there's nothing like efficiency. And this is nothing like efficiency.