I can HAZ WOPER?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Last week I completed 40 hours of Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) training. If any of y’all need a hazardous waste site cleaned up, I am your man (after 24 hours of further site specific training).

What a slog the training was. I am so not ever going back to school. The instructor was so full of himself and it could have been a 20 hour training without his often only tangentially related anecdotes. Before the class even started I found out that he thought that Obama wanted to destroy our country :dubious:. Later he revealed that he didn’t watch much TV except for Fox :rolleyes:. He had so many stories, some of them military service related, that it was hard to believe that he wasn’t full of shit. Especially when he messed up facts like putting the Exxon Valdez spill in the wrong decade and a local nuke plant in the wrong county (but that sure made his story about the fruits in Chapel Hill more interesting!).

Apparently having spent too long in academia and science research, I have been insulated from how dumb and unsophisticated the general populace is. I really try not to be elitist, but holy crap the mentality of this crew was unbelievable. First one local yokel was complaining about San Fransisco and that quickly degenerated into a run-ins with queers story contest (this was during a break). Later a number got way too much entertainment value from a number of safety videos in which people got blown up. The grand finale was during a final exercise in which “diking” to contain a spill was discussed resulting in predictable middle school type reactions.

Anybody else got entertaining off-site training stories?

2

Not a story, but my week of HAZWOPER training was the most brain cramping time of my life. The instructor taught like he was speaking to 6 year olds.

3

Judging from Baracus’s description of the class he attended, he probably was.

4

That was one of the more deadly training sessions I’ve attended. It was so nice to finally become the manager who assigns those duties.

  1. Pick the most anal person in the office,
  2. send him to the classes, and
  3. profit!
5

I did it back in 1978 as the only young pretty female in a crew of gnarly nasty pigheaded men. The first morning of class the instructor tried ordering me to make coffee for everybody, which I refused to do. What a bunch of condescending bigoted misogynistic jackasses.

6

Ugh, I know the joy of HAZWOPER every year, last year I only had to do the 8hr refresher and that was brutal enough.

Our project deals with lead and arsenic, that’s it. Our containment and safety procedures amount to “Practice basic personal hygiene.” Seriously, just don’t eat the dirt and don’t go spreading it around. It shouldn’t take 8hrs and a written exam.

7

I took the 24 hour HAZWOPER online recently. It “only” took about 16 hours to make it through, but it was the most painfully boring 16 hours I can remember. They literally went over the various pieces of legislation involved, and had quizes with asking which paragraphs of Chapter X subsection Y deal with training requirements, etc. I was about to explode.