One of my engineers decided to transfer to the Shanghai factory earlier this year. So, this July training was orphaned!! No trainers available. Considering that my team is already over-stretched in training deliveries, besides the expectations of providing online support and escalation management, I took it upon myself to deliver this class. 
I have been delivering this training about once a year since 3 years ago and almost once every 2 months in the years before that. So having to do this twice this year was not a big issue. I did the first this year in the first quarter in Beijing.
The class was a mix of experiences coupled with different support teams. I had at least 2 new engineers in class, 2 customer trainers, one call center personnel and of the rest of the attendees, 2 were from Thailand, one from India and one from Malaysia. 
So the challenge was to be able to deliver the training in English and Chinese while making sure that most of the participants understood me with my Malaysian English twang. Adding on to the challenge was the condition of the instruments in the training lab. 
We had missing parts, defective parts and instruments. I was tempted to call off the training with the most easily available excuse - that my father had passed away. But that would not have been fair to all the people who were expecting to be trained. 
So I persevered. I was suppose to have a co-trainer, but when he saw the list of attendees, he backed off and was not willing to even deliver one session. I guess the challenge for him was too big.
Anyway, the training went well despite all the challenges thrown up. 
I tried to inject some humor into the class and I think that for a majority of the people, that went well. We finally wrapped up the training with a graduation get together at a karaoke in Pudong. Everyone enjoyed themselves. 
We had S.H.E. and H.I.M. together with F4, Backstreet Boys, Westlife and a host of others entertaining us. I am sure you can tell we enjoyed ourselves in these photos!.
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