One Hand in my Pocket

How often do you find yourself being faced with a situation so ridiculous that you are torn between giving out one of those mad guffaws while one hand violently and repeatedly hits the thigh of the person sitting next to you or crying into your pillow like there is no tomorrow, or doing both at the same time?

It must have been over a week ago when I was involuntarily held against my will at a short meeting, in which I and another colleague were informed that we were chosen to give training to a bunch of middle aged men who belonged to the most exclusive club in the automotive industry (the <insert name of notoriously popular car maker here> supplier's club)

If you asked anyone in the industry, they'd tell you that it is indeed a big honour... especially me and my colleague (lets call him Ace, shall we?) being 'young guns' and all... I'm almost 30, and he's around 35. What they can't possibly imagine is how intimidating it would be for the likes of us to 'train' middle aged businessmen no matter how experienced we were in that particular field. See, the whole ridiculousness of the situation was pointed out during that very first meeting where the organising committee (it was represented by one woman) of this training had casually informed us to provide her with our respective profiles, while providing us with a sample of the profile of the trainer from a previous training conducted by a representative from another company who belonged to this same exclusive club. He had three freaking pages of achievements he had accumulated over the years in the field he gave training for. THREE FREAKIN' PAGES!

Ace and I tried picturing our profiles, and could barely come up with half a page... and joked about including achievements like having 3 kids and a wife (Ace, not me) or getting a cool new ride (me) and other such nonsense that has no connection whatsoever to prove that we are knowledgeable in the fields we were picked to train on - to the bemusement of the organising committee lady. The due date for the profile submission is next week, and I haven't even started on it (well, I suppose if I could create a whole 15 page power point presentation sans animation in less than an hour, half a page of achievements (ahem! snort) should be a breeze right?) My only worry (and rightly so) is that no one is going to take either of us seriously because of the less than impressive profile. They'd probably think it's a joke considering that the training will be held on April 1st. Damn.

Edit: This just in.

Turns out the club wants our profiles today, so Ace and I spent a few minutes this morning preparing it... we have three lines each. Less achievements probably means less expectations, so we're on the right track, I guess. And funnily enough, the organisers themselves thought that April Fool's Day may be a tad bit troublesome (are the middle aged businessmen full of fun and up to no good kind of people??) so they have postponed it to the 5th...