misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

I had to complete my job's mandatory sexual harassment training course today. This is about the third or fourth training course I've attended during the course of my career. Today I had the advantage of being able to complete the two-hour training course online. Though better than attending in person, the online presentation was still far from pleasant. Anticipating the pitfalls of moving their training online, HR intelligently programmed it such that you were forced to watch and listen to each page for a certain period of time before being able to advance. You also had to answer all sorts of questions which made you pay attention at first, at least until you realized the questions were answerable with only the use of regular, everyday, common sense. As example, one such question:

It is a) always b) sometimes c) never OK to call your co-worker a dirty, bean-eating, Mexican faggot.

Or something like that.

Ultimately, I have several problems with sexual harassment training. Firstly, 98% of the lessons they teach are steeped in common sense. Training only tells us what we already know: Using terms like anchovy cunt-face, fat titty whore, fucking chink, rice paddy gook, carpet munching dike, etc, is not proper for a work place environment. Also improper is punching a co-worker in the adam's apple, jerking off in the cafeteria, shoving Cheeze-Its up your secretary's ass in a client meeting, and watching hairy bear porn on your work computer. The only people who don't know this is ok are douche-bags, and douche-bags never learn from anything training courses, which is why they are douche-bags in the first place, so it is a moot point.

Another problem I have with this training courses is that it ultimately teaches you that the sensitivities of one person should always outweigh the needs of a group of people, which i fundamentally disagree with. One such example was a case in which an employee made a "good-bye" video for a co-worker who was being transferred to China. This video contained a scene from a Hong Kong TV show that one employee found offensive to her Asian heritage, whereas the entire rest of the company found hilarious. What did the training teach? Well, even if one person finds something offensive, and a million others don't, you should not show it, and it can be grounds for discipline. That thinking is pretty much the reason coffee cups have WARNING: CONTENTS ARE HOT messages, manpower is now personpower, and if I read the name LaShawna on a resume, I can't assume it's a black female. A few people complained about something that everyone else found perfectly acceptable, and because two people yelling are louder than a thousand people quiet, the change is made. I can understand one-on-one fuck-ups, like if I directly grab a co-workers tits and tell her to like it or she'll get fired. That should be policed. But if you don't like the hairy bear gay sex i'm watching on my cellphone with my friends when you happen to walk by, then fuck you.

The whole thing is just too serious. The idea that the workplace is some protective bubble where all human beings live in utmost respect and comfort with one another is unrealistic. Work is no different than life, and sometimes you are going to hear things or have things happen to you that you don't mesh with. Drop the bitch-boy angle and deal with it. If I assume because you're from Boston, you like the Red Sox, that isn't a stereotype, so don't complain. If you find part of a video insulting that 1000 other people didn't, well then you are probably a hyper-sensitive queef, and are offended by everything, and you should just ignore it rather than making 1000 other people suffer. In fact, here's a rule of thumb: If 999 people are laughing at something, and you aren't, well, the problem is with you, not them. Stop turning our world into a gay farm.

The good thing about the training is I can now confidently tell you that this blog violated 843 separate tenets of the harassment policy here. And I by here, I mean sfninja.com. Dragonhair subscribes to, and diligently enforces, the most stringent code of ethics when it comes to harassment.