The art of doodling

Its summer, the sun shines, occasionally, the birds chirp all the time and life is generally hunky dory because everyone in Europe is in some other country on holiday. Especially bosses. So its all good.

Clients tend to take holidays too and generally the priorities of the big bad world of business shift, not everything is due yesterday and there are less fires to fight. So now is when companies bring out the artists in their employees.

With the focus shifting partially from business, companies now use this time to train their employees. Accounting standards that have long been forgotten are refreshed, ways of auditing that are alien to you are taught and expected to be applied.

However, none of this interests me more than to help me earn my 3 square meals a day. What I would really like to do is to spend a day after each training course analysing the doodles each person has indulged in during the training.

I'm not quite sure what it is that triggers the scribble happy hormone in the body, is it the free paper, free pen, free coasters or the extreme boredom of a classroom session, one will never know, but without exception, everyone doodles. I'm sure it would make an interesting case study on doodling trends. We could probably learn truckloads about the employee from what they doodle.

Some are inherently artistic and draw exquisite pencil sketches while pretending to take notes and listen, others who are less gifted, like me, simply settle down to identifying fancy, out of this world ways of writing/signing their own name.

During the 8 hours I was in training this week, I would have signed my name at least 450 times (I kind of lost count around the 300 mark). The person sitting next to me put Picasso to shame with around 4 master pieces while two others on my table tied their cross-knots duel at 30 each.

So tell me, what do you doodle when you're in training? Answers which even vaguely imply that you listen to the lecture will be taken with more than a pinch of salt.