That's a couple of hours of my life I'm not getting back

I work in IT, in a highly technical role. This is not to say I'm some kind of uber-geek with an autism-spectrum disorder and no social skills (OK, yes, I do write code in my own time for fun, AND I keep my books/CDs/DVDs in alphabetical order, but there's more to me than that, honest). I work on the techie-toys because I enjoy it.

Where's all this leading?

Recently, because my company has become a "Partner" with a leading database software supplier, everyone in our team was told to sit a "Technology Support Champion" (why does everything have to have a "Champion"?) exam, which we were required to pass by the end of the month.

Never in all my born days have I come across such a colossal waste of time. The exam had a pre-assessment test, which I did to find out which areas I was weak on. Fair enough, but when I came to do the exam proper, most of the questions were just repeats of the pre-assessment.

What am I complaining about then?

I'm complaining about the fact that there was no rigour to the thing to start with, which renders it worthless. You could sit the test as many times as you liked and, at the end, it gives you all the correct answers so you could just print out the pages and use them next time you sit the test. The question bank was so small that you were guaranteed a high number of repeat questions anyway, so a chimp could pass it eventually.

But there's more. The test had more to do with knowledge of buzzwords like "delivering excellence", "maximizing customer experience" and "leveraging customer assets" than with anything actually useful to me in my job.

Personally, if I met the pony-tailed, goatee-wearing marketing freak that come up with this kind of drivel then I'd leverage his global synergies so far up his value-added self-service portal it'd make his eyes water.