Went to the 8-hour benefits training thingie for my new job yesterday. By the time I left I'd lost all will to live. Here were the highlights:
"Now that you are an employee of [this public governmental organization], you represent [this public governmental organization]. So all your friends and family will be coming to you for answers to their questions about how government works.
(Yeah. Only, see, my family and friends don't talk about lame stuff, thank you. Also we have the Internet.) For this reason, we will now spend 3 hours explaining the executive and the judicial branch with the use of this flip chart, which you will undoubtedly remember from 2nd grade math."
The instructor was talking about different Utah towns and wrote Toole on the board by mistake. Then corrected herself: "Wait a minute, sorry,
Tool doesn't spell
Too-ill-uh." She fixed it by adding an
e. (
Tooele.) Yeah . . . only that doesn't really spell it either, see. I love (read:
hate) this about Utah. Ask me sometime how Mantua is pronounced. (Hint: it rhymes with
Ban-oh-way. Also? I hear its residents are cannibals. That's just what I've heard. Hey, like any of them will (can) read this.)
We got to watch not one but
two videos about harrassment and ethics in the workplace. They were about as professionally done as the one Michael Scott had to watch in that episode of The Office.
We had some of the usual characters in the group. There was Front-Row Guy, and there was Aggressive, Tough, Somewhat-Hostile girl. They were not a good combination, since ATSHG was ready to kill FRG by the end. So were we all, but she was the one who actually threatened to do it, right in the middle of the life insurance portion of the day. Because here you had Front-Row Guy, doing what a Front Row Guy does. He asked questions every 5 minutes, restated everything the presenter just said, and kept asking hypothetical questions that absolutely did not apply to him, just to make our lives worse--questions like, "I see this chart only lists the health insurance premiums up to the employee plus two beneficiaries. What if you have more than two beneficiaries?"
DUDE. You are
single and you work 20 HOURS A WEEK. STOP TALKING NOW or I will let ATSHG go to town on you with her acrylic nails.
Then ATSHG got increasingly antsy and started not only threatening to kill FRG but also telling the 401K representative that his stock-buying analogy was "retarded." At the break the moderator pulled her aside to tell her she wasn't allowed to say "retarded" in class.
We were asked how many of us have enrolled in direct deposit for our paychecks. We raised our hands and the moderator instructed a volunteer to hand us all a shiny little pin with the [public governmental organization] logo on it. I put my hand back down. She said this was to reward us, and to motivate those who haven't already signed up for direct deposit. Since you know those non-direct-depositors were just kicking themselves right then. Seriously, who do they really think they're fooling with that crap? That's like the time I worked for the Lord's University and we were given polo shirts with the department logo on them and told that we get to wear them on Fridays, as sort of a casual Friday kind of thing
"Cool, we get casual Fridays now?"
"Yeah, only we're calling it
Promotional Friday."
"But we get to wear jeans, right?"
"Well, no. But you get to wear this nice polo shirt!"
"Then how is that casual?"
"Well if you're a guy you don't have to wear a tie."
"But I'm NOT a guy."
"Well . . . "
"So this is actually MORE dress code, not less."
"Just take the shirt."
And my friends and loved ones will tell you, those were some hideous shirts. Especially since every year they put MEN in charge of picking them and they inevitably picked something that belonged on a safari jeep and not on an attractive Singleton whose coloring does not support oatmeal-barf-colored apparel. Also there was the one that looked like a NASA shirt (post 9/11, navy blue with American flag patches all over.) Those were my two faves. But I loved how employers try to pretend like this stuff is a privilege or reward. If someone walked up to me and slapped a bumper sticker on my forehead, do you think I'd mistake it for a present? I promise I wouldn't. (Unless it was a bumper sticker that said "
There'll be no butter in hell!" I'd wear that.)
