Today I was treated to one of the many perks of working for a company that does silly things like follow the law: “sensitivity training.”
At first, I was quite excited to be asked to attend this training as one of my 2009 objectives is to be more sensitive to my co-workers’ needs. However, I quickly learned that I was not there to learn when to drape my coat over my manager’s shoulders during project status meetings; I was there to learn that I probably should have been fired a long time ago.
Apparently, being “sensitive” in this context is about not being an asshole, a slut, and/or a creep. Don’t show your favorite Red Tube clips to the interns as part of orientation, don’t have sex with your manager to get your expense report signed faster, don’t fondle your staff while congratulating them on a new business win, don’t be a racist, bigotty, sexist fuckface….blah, blah, blah, yeah we all know this is wrong and stupid and in the words of our trainer, totally and completely “fucking inappropriate.”
And speaking of “inappropriate,” what was really interesting about the sensitivity training was that it was solely based on several scenarios that we had to rate on an APPROPRIATENESS scale of 5 to 1 --- 5 being so wrong you should be castrated and have your teeth kicked in, and 1 being totally OK even though you probably work with one hypersensitive twat who’ll whine about it. They were all good examples of douchebaggery; however, I think if we are highlighting what he called “inappropriate behavior at work,” he overlooked several key situations that I would like to offer for your consideration below. Please feel free to rate them.
1. You put a non-fat strawberry yogurt cup with your name on it in the refrigerator on Tuesday.
The yogurt is gone Wednesday morning.
2. It is 9:00am on Monday and you notice a co-worker utilizing the only coffee maker in the office to make a pot of decaf.
3. Your manager schedules a meeting at 4:30pm on a Friday.
4. A co-worker in the cubicle next to you eats a tuna melt at their desk.
5. Everyone on your team accepts your meeting request, but no one accepts the responsibility for actually showing up for the meeting.
6. A co-worker sends you an e-mail and then within 30 seconds calls you to see if you have read said e-mail.
7. You are in a brainstorming session and a co-worker is obscenely overusing phrases like, “low-hanging fruit” and “pull-through strategy” and “let’s discuss offline”
8. Your manager schedules a meeting at 8:30am on a Monday.
9. You are washing your hands in the bathroom and a co-worker comes in and proceeds to tell you about his/her weekend in excruciating detail.
10. A co-worker brings in from home or buys inordinate amounts of junk food to share with the office, and places the communal pile of calories on the table directly across from your office.
I will leave you with one of my all-time favorite Conan O’Brien skits that I was replaying in my head throughout the entire sensitivity training….how….very…..(drum roll please)……..inappropriate.
