can be quite highly strung, and so can people. In between each board I nail in place, I figure I should share with you a lil' story about how weird people can be at times...

Now work today was a bit interesting, as I had to deal with one of my participants walking out on me in the afternoon session. One of the ladies was a bit defensive about having to do the First Aid course at all, and kept claiming she had "work" to do, and so kept disappearing from my course. Now, over the two days she missed out on almost three hours worth of information, and several assessments. What this meant was that I could not justifiably pass her for the course, given that she had not demonstrated all her competencies.

I spoke to her about my concern during the lunch break, and she was again very defensive about her actions. I suggested I assess her when I could during the breaks on the topics she had missed, and gave her some pages to read up on. I managed to get her through one assessment, but at the end of the day, the wheels fell off. While I was getting her to help manage a casualty, I had asked her to redo a Sling several times, as it was not effective. She got upset, muttered something about "Not being here to be humiliated" and stormed out.

So there I was, trying to figure out how best to deal with this and trying to assess a whole bunch of other participants at the same time. I managed to get through them all fairly quickly, and tried to find her to have a chat about assessing her after the session is she needed, so that she could finish the course... Except that she had left and gone home. So I had to fail her for the course, something I don't have to do very often. I chatted with her boss, who was also in the course and he supported me in my decision, which was nice. :)

I seem to have had a run of highly strung people in courses lately. I didn't think First Aid was quite that stressful, but maybe I'm wrong? It's all a bit strange, really...