So, last week I was made to take two hours of mandatory training about workplace sexual harassment and equal employment opportunities. (No, it wasn’t because I did something stupid like Michael Scott in The Office. All senior staff are required to take it every two years.) I’m sure it’s just a legal cover your arse move for the company so that people can’t claim that no one told them it was illegal to harass and discriminate, but the training was mind numbingly boring. It went through many hypothetical scenarios and explained whether and why they were legal or not, even though it should be blindingly obvious to everyone nowadays. Some scenarios were about what you would expect, such as someone getting fired when she won’t go out with her manager, and someone not getting hired because he was hispanic. Some were incredibly contrived, however. For example, there was a story about a nurse who had a “moral objection to nudity” and refused to assist the doctor in examining a patient in an OBGYN office :rolleyes:, and why it was probably legal to fire her. Then there was something along the line of how it’s not ok to refuse to hire Canadians because you believe that Canadians “lack the attention to details needed for the job”. (WTF? How the hell did they dream that one up?!)
Has anyone come across any other lame training materials that you care to share?
My boss: friedo, it says here you haven’t taken the sexual harassment training yet.
Me: Oh, I’ve already been fully trained in sexual harassment, sugartits.
I remember watching a video about sexual harassment where the actors role-playing the scenarios were both women (a woman + a woman pretending to be a man). It made the whole thing into a joke. Plus they were talking about really stupidly obvious things, like “If a person gets a porn pop up on their computer by accident when visiting a site and you happen to see it, that’s not harassment. But if they leave it up on their screen on purpose for others to see, that could be considered harassment.” No shit.
The last time I had the sexual harassment seminar at work it was given by a woman wearing a tight green sweater who was either incredibly cold or every excited about something. I can’t remember the specifics of the seminar but I still remember her high beams mainly because of the irony.
I was actually in a training video for my agency once. They put out a casting call, and it was kind of fun. They made me one of the bad examples in a security video. I left the visitor I was escorting unattended in a file room while I talked on my cell phone out in the hall.
Every two years? You’re lucky - we have to go through this idiocy annually. In fact, I’ve been to Prevention of Sexual Harrassment every stinking year since 1981. And the training gets stupider every year. But that’s understandable, because I’m a federal employee and most of the mandatory training we get is stupid and lame.
Truly the worst I had to sit thru was a rah-rah pep rally training event on “tolerance” full of pathetic skits written by people on the EEO team and culminating with the command’s lawyer giving us a talk as if he was a fire-and-brimstone preacher. I’m pretty sure that’s what kept them from ever trying that approach again.
My ‘continuing education’ in the financial services industry is a joke. It usually consists of hypothetical scenarios like meeting someone in a parking lot with a briefcase full of cash from a 3rd world country.
I remember some of the training I did. This was for management trainees for a service station. In one section one of us had to tell a wife her husband had been killed. In another, we went through an armed robbery (yes, guys in masks “relaistically” brandishing guns…and no it wasn’t a wimped down version…
About thirty years ago a training session in which I participated included a test at the end of it, upon which our continued employment depended. The two items I recall from the test were that we had to identify a picture of a hammer (as in “that’s a hammer”), and that we had to know how many pounds of pressure per square inch it takes from an air hose inserted up your rectum to blow your intestines out your mouth (the required answer was thirty-five, but how they came up with that number I have no idea – perhaps that happened to be the pressure in a hose involved in such an incident).
At first I thought having to recognize a hammer was so basic that it was a stupid question. Then when I came to the air up the anus question, I wondered who in hell would be stupid enough to try to inflate themself. That’s when I realized that the hammer question might help weed out those who would play proctologist with the air hose.
I would thing that it would be very easy to steal small items from a video store, so some maangers would think if they had reason to believe the employee stole an item they could search or strip search them.
For starters, any case where materials designed in one country are then used to teach in a country with different laws.
This includes several cases I’ve seen where the actions described as legal in the materials were illegal in the country where the stuff was being taught. Not “a bit illegal”, not “may get you fired”, not “may get you fined”: “may get you taken out of the factory by two extremely-polite fellows in green uniforms and shiny tricorn hats and driven directly to see a judge at Criminal Court”.
I remember a safety video that we had to watch in high school (or was it college? I can’t remember) chemistry class. There was a section on pranks that showed, iirc, a girl snapping the safety goggles of a boy (lesson - no pranks in the lab), and a warning that the laboratory thermometers we would be using were not medical thermometers and did not have to be, and should not be, shaken before use (this was back in the day when people used mercury medical thermometers at home and in the clinic). The film showed a student shaking a long lab thermometer and accidentally whacking their desk with it. There was also another scene that was fairly gory in terms of how you could seriously injure yourself with lab equipment. I remember the whole thing as being incredibly funny, and maybe that’s why I remember it even now, and so one could say it was effective in its goal.
I am saddened that this is not how the financial services industry works. I do have to ask, in this hypothetical situation are you supposed to take the money or not?
How the hell did they dream that one up?!)
