I did too (had to talk to an employee about her smell), it was not an easy chat.
There are in the US too: the Age Discrimination in Employment Act puts employees over age 40 in a protected class.
Both citizenship status and national origin are protected classes in the US as well.
So I guess not only were you getting information designed for the US, it wasn’t even correct for the US (unless it was more than a few decades ago).
I guess this doesn’t come up often in those typical training scenarios, but I’ve heard often of big US companies starting branches in Europe and sending managers over who had no idea that you can’t fire people as you like here, because employees are protected. They were quite surprised when being told that (Sometimes from the “Betriebsrat” workers council )
“Hey Frank, try this.”
“Gee, I dunno, Billy. The training says not to.”
“It’s cool. It’s only set to 34.”
“Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? Pass that sucker over!”
My dad used to run a trade association for service station owners. One of the benefits of being a member was getting a quarterly publication called The Safety Letter that was nothing but a compilation of stupid ways that employees had injured/killed themselves at service stations. Air hose pranks gone wrong were a reoccurring theme.
EVERY employee that works for the company I do has to go through mandatory safety training, which is fine, except it’s 100% geared towards operations guys, not people in head office. I work as an Analyst, but I know how to safely fuel up equipment, what PPE to wear when I am laying asphalt, safety when at a ready mix plant, etc., etc. None of it related to my job and it was about three hours of interactive video (with a quiz after each section - your score is kept on file and you need to get 80% to pass).
The one I remember, and the one for which I was encouraged to fire an employee was the guy that got sent to hospital after trying to syphon diesel from a petrol car by sucking (yes the station did have a proper syphon device, no he didn’t use it, yes he was trained in its use)
You’re not a librarian are you? Because I don’t envy my former boss who had to tell a co-worker she stunk and tell a different co-worker (a 16 year old girl) that no matter how much of a free spirit she is, she has to wear a bra.
As if that was the only piece of underwear she didn’t wear!
Well, that’s disheartening. That my experience is not rare.
As I mentioned myself, yes. I guess part of the problem is that there are a relatively high amount of sources on what’s allowed and not, compared with other countries, so it’s not as easy to keep track, but in general the anti-discrimination training and the discriminatory treatments I’ve gotten out of or in the US was… scary.
constanze, I’ve seen job ads in Spain where the first item offered, in big bold letters, was “medical insurance”. No shit! You mean, as required by Social Security Law? :smack: US parent company, every time.
I used to work in the legal department of a large public financial services company, preparing work visa pettions for the company’s own employees. I was not in a role that involved access to other people’s money (or the company’s money, except for one very limited purpose - requesting filing fee checks for the aforementioned work visa petitions for company employees).
After a while, I started getting threatening robo-emails that because I worked in the legal department, I was required to attend some kind of day-long money laundering training, which I absolutely did not have time to attend. I asked my boss, and my boss’ boss, both of whom agreed that it would be silly and counterproductive for me to attend, and they could think of no reason why I should. So I tried replying to the e-mail, contacting other people in the head office of the legal department in New York, etc. to see if there was some actual reason I had to attend, given that my management didn’t think I did, and never got an answer. So I didn’t bother, and never heard back about it.
Seriously, people, if my requesting checks made out to the Department of Homeland Security is a money laundering risk, the company (or Homeland Security) has much bigger problems than my attendance at a a one-day training is going to solve.
No discussion of lame training videos is complete without a mention of the Armed Forces Network’s PSAs about various topics that we get overseas instead of commercials.
Not much of an instruction session, but when I was hired by the university, I was appraised (verbally) that I must not release prisoners. I then had to sign the disclaimer that I had been appraised of this fact and would not, in point of fact, release prisoners. Turns out that the state’s got only one disclaimer form for all its employees…at least I can rest assured now that the prison wardens are going to make sure to always obtain parental permissions when relevant for underage students!
Ah, I thought you said that you must not release poisoners. What you said makes a lot more sense (I think).
My guess was either mechanic or else porn actor.
Not lame, just unusual.
I worked on a vessel (oil patch) in the '80s, and we had to watch a film on how to use the life boats/rafts, should we need to evacuate. Crews were all male at the time. The actors in the film were all pretty girls in two-piece swimsuits. Boss told me it was done this way to get everyone to pay attention.
Christ, I’ve never worked anywhere big enough for an employee handbook, whether or not an HR department.
However, I am good at figuring out which coworkers are cool with conversations about, say, the Human Centipede movie so I don’t get into trouble with the boss.
Also, not HR training, but driver training: watching those high speed chase videos they always show on TV with names like ‘Most Shocking Police Chases!!!1111’.
I’m about 60-70% sure that this video - in this form, that is - is a fake. I think they took a real training video, with the title card and the little graphic, and added all the gore scenes. For one, the gore is too graphic and too long. Another little hint are the commentaries - they sound self-ironic on the second taste. For example, the introduction, where the narrator says that Klaus has now the certificate to operate mobile machinery on the company area … called commonly Forklift driver license. That’s the easy term 
And when his colleague starts working on the forklift, he says “Well, I don’t have two left hands”, right before Klaus starts the motor and the guy’s hands are cut off!
Later, the same guy reappars in the foreground, working with two protheses, sorting screws.
After the sensible advise that pedestrians should keep to their seperate walkways, and forklift drivers watch out for them nevertheless, we later see a high-heeled woman walking along for the sole purpose of distracting all the guys, although she shouldn’t walk around alone on the factory floor.
I love also the (typical German) attitude after the box cutting knife hits one guy on the head: the bell rings for lunch break (Mahlzeit) and the guy just pulls the knife out and walks off - hey, lunch break is important!
Heh, if you want to talk about gore in training videos, you know the joke on the Simpsons about the driving safety video called “Red Mist” or something like that? The one that consisted of nothing but footage of [strike]horribly[/strike] hilariously graphic carnage at auto accident scenes? The only things they made up about that were the host and the name of the videos.
In real life, the California Highway Patrol produces “Red Asphalt”, a series of videos where they basically do nothing but show the graphic remains of people who died in car accidents due to things like drunk driving. What was really funny about Red Asphalt V (which I was actually forced to watch at my last base just because I was under the age of 26), was that they never actually explained WHY drinking alcohol causes you to get into horrible accidents, evidently it just does via evil magicks, cause that’s more explanation than the video actually attempted to give.
Of course, by that point, I was already turned off on the whole thing by the two guys giving the anti-drunk-driving lecture that we had been forced to go to. These guys were abrasive, jerkish, and as it eventually dawned on us, assuming that we were all there because we had been caught drunk driving (very very few of us were in trouble for that sort of thing. We were there because we were in a high-risk age group, but just the same the two lecturers decided we needed to be treated like a bunch of assholes for two hours).
Afterwards, the Command Chief for our Wing sent out a mass email to the airmen who had been to the presentation to get some feedback about it, and ho boy did I give him some honest feedback of what I felt about the whole thing (basically the least effective and most aggravating anti-drunk-driving presentation of my entire life. The thing nearly drove me to drink!)