I embark on my Central American cruise

So, having taken a leave of absence from my prior project (the one I have been on since June but which now is on life support, with only 40 hours a week and no actual work to do), I am headed for Central America. As I boarded my cruise ship, I managed to snag a seat at the end of the row (not the end against the wall, unfortunately), thus limiting my potential exposure to a single temp. Alas, my back is wide open. Still, it is not the worst seat ever.

I can see from here that this cruise has no buffet, nor are there private staterooms. In fact, they seem to have chained me to an oar:

Damn.  That sucks. As vacations go, this one is turning out not so good.

On the other hand, I have just been informed that there will be more than 30 hours of overtime available per week. So we have that going for us. On the other hand, since we started yesterday, we have been in orientation and training for two days now and have totaled only 14 hours. There will not be 30 hours of overtime this week, for sure. I'm not real clear on what kind of training and orientation we need to go to Central America, especially since none of it involves learning Spanish, but there you go.

There are a number of familiar faces here -- at least three people from my last project who apparently decided it was a good time to go to Central America. Tempted by the overtime, no doubt. There also were a pretty good number of folks from the L Street Massacre back in September. They were not among the most competent of temps then, either. Yes, Milhouse was one of them. Of course, he got here late enough that he couldn't find a good seat, and so he wanted to go to the other suite we're using because he "wanted to see if I like this side better." I sympathize -- your seat is all you have, after all -- but you go where they tell you. You're a temp, dude. Choices R Not Us. Deal with it.

I will have more comments on orientation later.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Just sat through the technical training session for the review platform we'll be using on this project. Six veteran temps, not a single one of us had even heard of the platform before. Not usually a good sign. It either means 1) the platform sucks, or b) it is so cheap that the firm couldn't resist using it, which usually means that both 1) and b) apply. We'll find out, I guess.

The training was not encouraging.  I think the platform will be easy enough to code with, but the training touched on actual coding for about 45 seconds. Mostly the trainer (speaking to us by phone while demonstrating on a projection screen from a computer remotely controlled by him) went on about all the various search and folder features and all kinds of nifty stuff we could do that we don't need to do. All we heard was "Boolean blah blah blah folder blah blah blah public blah blah blah shared blah blah blah private blah blah blah. Any questions?"

What I should have said:

"I don't do Boolean. I'm not here to do searches. I'm here so that you can put shit in front of me, I code it until it's gone, and you put more shit in front of me and I code that until eventually everything is coded. I don't need nuance, I don't need nifty features, I need my project manager to have administrative rights so he can batch documents for us and put them in front of us to code, and I don't have that. Boolean that, pal."

Didn't say that. Which means we're at an impasse for the moment.