Sorry, I'm not trained for that...

Just had a hilarious conversation at lunch during which myself, and two colleagues (one Algerian, one Polish) had a good rag on all things English.

My favourite is the story told by A., which involved buying cheese at a local Sainsbury’s.

“So my boyfriend and I bought a slice off a wheel of cheese, because we wanted to take it with us to the park and make sandwiches. We realised that we didn’t have a sharp knife, so we took the slab of cheese back to the deli and kindly asked if it could be sliced… only to be greeted by a look of dumb panic from the Sainsbury’s deli employee.

"Um, I dunno”, he mumbled. “You see, I haven’t been trained on this.”

P. then told a story about trying to get an extra link added to his watch. After waiting weeks for the part to arrive, he went to the shop as requested and was told to wait 15 minutes. Thirty minutes, then forty-five minutes and then an hour passed. When P. inquiried about his watch, he was told, quite rudely, that it wasn’t ready yet, and that he should probably do some more shopping and then come back. When P. that he didn’t have time to wait any longer, he was told that there was only one person who was specially trained to add links to watches and he was unavailable… and she was unable to provide a time as to when he might be able to make himself available. P. promptly lost his temper, demanded his money back and sought custom elsewhere.

My contribution to this party was sharing the ridiculousness I encountered at my last job. The employees had been requesting a microwave in the new building for months, and HR kept demurring. After a particularly vocal employee feedback session, the reason emerged that HR was very concerned about the health and safety implications of having a microwave in the kitchen, and about the accidents which could potentially occur without proper training.

Seriously.

In the end we got the microwave… but posted to the top and side of it, and also on the counter door above, were explicit instructions on how to handle it safely. Nevermind the fact that they bought what had to be the cheapest option out there and so it took finding an engineer to figure out how simply reheat last night’s dinner.

Ahhh, England.