As jet set lady said my door was still in manual because we'd only just had the alert call.
Looking at the botched ryanair evac it does seem that their training falls very far short. Not being aware that a door may be far heavier in an evac should be adressed in SEP day 1! Its interesting to note that ryanair pilot sops's don't ask them to add on further information (if they have it) when ordering an evac ie: fire/smoke on left hand side etc - which they would with us. This may have made some difference to this incident although with inexperienced, badly trained crew perhaps not.
I also think in some airlines there is a real rigidity to training and the crew are not encouraged to make decisions themselves. In my incident the sops stated that I should be at my alert station awaiting the NITS or Evac command, but I was also taking the time to clear the area and check outside which, although sensible, was not written down in black and white.
I've heard that some crew have to memorise the emergency announcement (I'd like to see ayone try to recite that from memory in a smoking cabin with 150 screaming pax) and CM's/CSD's etc not being encouraged to to make notes on nits briefings.
It was always underlined to us that an incident would never play out as it did in training and to make use of anything to help. But then all this was underpinned by lots of sim work, videos/discussions about past incidents etc.
I feel that with the way the market is going airlines will increasingly do the very minimum training to make an operation legal. This allied with a high turnover of crew, less able candidates etc etc will just make the situation worse.