First days of work

What is the best way to train a relatively inexperienced IT person to fully be capable of providing a small company with all the technological needs they may need? That question was left up to the two people who had my job prior to my hiring. They had concluded that, with the two short weeks that they had to train me, the most efficient way of training me would firstly just be allowing me to sit down, read, and absorb as much information I could gather from Wikipedia. Beyond that they hoped that anything more specifically pertaining to my job they would just teach me as the need aroused.

So, on the first day, I started my haphazard research with a general list of terms I should research on Wikipedia that they sent me via email:

"Greetings!

Read these articles:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

and familiarize yourself with everything here:

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Layer
7. http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/

Yours,"

I opened the first link in email and read through the first paragraph of the article. I sat back and thought about what I had just read, realizing that I hadn't a clue what it meant. I then attacked the first paragraph another time, this time clicking on the first hyperlinked term to better understand what was being said. When I was brought to the article about packet-switched internetwork I once again stumbled upon several terms I didn't quite understand the meanings of. So I continued my process of clicking on terms I need to know to understand the context I was attempting to read and dug into the subject furvantly.

My reading session was eventually interupted by my coworker who reminded me that it was lunch time and I should take a break. By this time I was buried about thrity links deep and had only managed to progress to the third paragraph of the first term that was suggest to me. By the end of the working day I was exhausted and unsure of how much I actually learned through all the reading I had done.

The next work day came and I started my reading again. I read the first paragraph, sat back, and thought if I could summarize what had been said:

"Internet Protocol is the standard of communicating data through the internet which, um, it uses addresses and data encryption to send packets?" I guessed to myself. This time I was able to just quickly browse through a hyperlink to reestablish what I learned from the day before. I got close, much to my surprise. I finished reading the rest of the article about Internet Protocol that day and felt pretty confident I understood the jist of it.

Only on the third day, when I started on the second recommended article, that I started to feel like I was actually learning something as I was able to skip many hyperlinked terms because I already understood their definitions. Even after several days of tediously reading through articles on the web I still had little to boost my confidence that I will be able to do my job satifactorally- I guess my three month job review will be the truest test.