In my dream, I am about to start teaching a class in power plant controls. Very much the kind of work I did for Leeds & Northrup for so many years.
This system being described is much smaller than the pulverized-coal utility boilers that would normally be the subject of my course. And so the course is scheduled to be much shorter. And I have some familiarity with the technicians who will be my students -- and they seem to be very good at their jobs. And so, the course should be easy and fun.
The students are starting to gather in the classroom and I should be going in myself sometime soon. But it suddenly hits me that I haven't studied anything about the details of this system -- and I don't have any system documentation that would bring me "up to speed" quickly. I recall what I would have to do to get a copy of the documents, but that would likely take a couple of days at least. And I normally have a copy of these documents for each student, so he/she can make notes on the drawings and write notes in the text margins. I don't have anything like that either.
As a Plan B for today's work, I consider just talking about the equipment we're providing to control the customer's facility rather than the actual work that our system will perform. But I'm not sure of exactly what we're providing, so I can't use that as a stalling technique.
I think about simply telling my customer contact person (someone with whom I have had an excellent relationship) the truth and asking to delay the class for a day or more. I can see his face darken and a frown develop: I've let him down and made his job much more difficult. The major problem for him is that this is a Union Shop and such a delay/rescheduling will allow the Union officials to demand additional pay for these technicians and possibly even days off. And things like that will become part of his performance records -- with a negative affect on any future raises or promotions.
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