Uh oh. This is the two-day course I missed in London that time when Peter was ill and I was supposed to replace him. Looks like I might have to do it after all.
"Do I really need to do it?" I asked. I've kind of been doing the role it's aimed at for a while. Plus, from what the other engineers have told me, the course seems to be two days of playing with Lego bricks in teams. Between you and me, I have Lego at home...
"It would be helpful to say you've done it. Plus you get certified," said my manager.
Certified eh? Two days in London for a piece of freshly printed A4 paper with my name on it. I'll tell you who needs a certificate for going in to London - everyone who does it every day - every single poor soul who has to get up ludicrously early, stand at a bus stop and then on a crowded platform, muscling into a stuffy tin tube for forty minutes, wobbling about to the n'cha tsks of someone else's headphones while the train jolts across the country, and putting up with the grim claustrophobia of the capital day in, day out. They need certificates, those people; hand-rolled parchments with gold frames and personalised calligraphy which has been painstakingly penned by the CEO of First Great Western himself. On his day off.
I've developed a new game on my walk in to work - predicting the exact point at which I should start eating a banana so that when I finish it I'm next to the rubbish bin and I can slip the skin straight in. It's somewhere between the junction box and the cherry tree by the lake.
"There's no chance I could do the training... in-house... is there?" I asked, tentatively. He looked quite pleased at that suggestion, as though he thought I might be altruistically thinking about how to save the company a couple of train fares. Yeah that too, I thought, but mostly it was just me being selfish. If I'm going to London I want to go for dinosaurs, history, music or food - and definitely not at rush hour.
"I'll look into it," he said.
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