"Training day"

are words which make me shudder. 
I was supposed to be attending one today. It was for some "voluntary" work I do.
Fortunately for me the person organising it said,
    "No point in you coming Cat. It's pitched at those who do tea duty."
No, it isn't actually tea duty but I knew what she meant. It is a compulsory unit for the people who go along on a regular basis to do something entirely different. I attend this venue when I am called in to help with communication issues. Although it is a "volunteer" position in that I am not paid I am there as a professional person. There are so few of us who work like this and we face such varied issues that a "training day" would be almost impossible to put together even if we were some sort of "group". 
But "training days" seem to be compulsory for everyone now. There was a "training day" at the local charity shop recently. They closed the place for the morning and an outsider came in.
The staff told me about it later. Fortunately the people who work there have a good sense of humour. They needed it because the "trainer" was trying to teach them about "customer relations". 
    "She was a lovely person Cat but she had no idea about so many of the people we see in here." (It's a big organisation which runs many services and many of their clients are welfare recipients who need a lot of help.) 
They had the "occupational health and safety" people in last year too. There were arguments about the way things were organised and handled. The volunteers there were prepared to listen but they despaired of the "suggestions" made.  Safety is an issue there and everyone knows it - because most of the people who work there are elderly. They are the people who have the time. The problem is they do things differently from some bright young "trainer" spark with definite ideas.
I am very glad I don't have to go to a training day which tells me how to make the tea or hold someone's hand in a crisis situation. 
Yesterday I asked P.... who works in the charity shop what she would have liked as part of the training day. She thought about it for a moment,
     "Well teaching us all how to use the new cash register would have been good."
Then she gave me a wicked little smile and said, "And perhaps they could come and train the customers to put things back where they found them?"
Now that would be training worth having.