Apparently, while I’m off this week on vacation, the rest of my office has become either super motivated or insane. I’m going to put my money on insane. We had discussed last week our “goals” for 2009, and since our company is also big on continuing education and learning new skills, we also talked about things we might like to learn or get training on in 2009. I had mentioned my desire to learn more advanced CSS and PHP as well as a little more javascript and things of that nature. Apparently, I don’t get to choose, which to me defeats the purpose, because I just got an email from a co-worker, who’s acting like they’re in charge of our learning, declaring that we’ll all be learning Flash in January and he even gave out our first ASSIGNMENT.

I’m trying to work out a way of talking to him about it without sounding like an asshole, but I really have zero desire to learn Flash. It’s a non-standard, plugin requiring nuisance that, in my opinion, is actually fading away and won’t be very useful down the line. I would much much rather learn some heavy CSS, or something that’s a web standard than something that, in my previous experience, is always a pain in the ass.

It’s not that I can wrap my head around it. I’ve actually used Flash before. I’m familiar with the concepts, the timeline, all that good stuff. It’s just that I don’t WANT to learn it. I’ve got projects galore next year, all of them on the web and not a single one of them can or will support Flash. It’s simply not something I design for, develop, enjoy, use or would recommend using. I think it’s nearly a dead technology. The Flash bubble burst a long time ago and now the only people that use it, use it for things like navigation, or things that could be easily accomplished with more compatible technologies like Scriptaculous.

I’ll buck up and pretend to learn a little, but really, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that it’s A) been decided for me what we’re going to learn and B) it’s something so not worth my time that I’m hardly motivated to do it at all. But, I guess that’s what being “part of a team” is all about. Now all those Office jokes make sense.