Preventing Harassment(tm)

At my day job, I have to suffer through the annual “Preventing Harassment” seminar — an online course that takes 120 minutes to complete, though all of the quizzes tell you what the right answers are so it’s kind of a click-fest. I don’t quite understand the purpose when they give you the answers… In what world does that tactic actually educate the student? “Should you kill again? The correct answer to stop me from asking these fucking asinine questions is B, ‘no.'”

Um… No! *continues loading gun*

(By the way, before I continue, I should note that every race gets a turn at being beat up by white people during the course, but we only see one black person and he’s always treated with a strange, loving respect. So are we no longer prejudiced against blacks? Is all that over? That’s cool. From the corporate perspective, I guess white America only has a problem with Muslims, Asians, and fat single mothers with red hair. I always thought those prejudices — at least the last one — were okay, so I guess this course was helpful…)

I think the most distracting issue is that Chris, the sexy lawyer chick who introduces the videos I’m to be quizzed on later, is super hot. She’s obviously a spic, so I bet she loves anal! (Now that I wrote that on a public blog, I’m wondering if one of the videos I skipped addressed that sort of language…?)

There’s this one video where some cougar who is ace at baking enormous quantities of really yummy looking coffee cake is complaining about how her husband doesn’t fuck her anymore. “All he wants is cake!”

Well…stop making him cake, then, you stupid whore.

The young guy on the receiving end of this complaint seems upset and telegraphs awkwardness in a way that only a washed up actor in a Preventing Harassment video could… But I don’t get this at all. If a bitch is gagging for it, then you give it to her, right? That option was not featured in the follow-up multiple choice problem, so I was at a loss. At least give us a write-in option, yeah? “Bitch need some hot cubical slave dick.”

A later video, where neo-conservative fuckwads listen to some trash on the radio and then proceed to tease a hugely fat mother of three for being a bad mother (as you do) had some amusing options in the follow-up quiz: (A) The First Amendment protects everything the co-workers say; (B) There is no freedom of speech in the workplace; and the nebulous (C) The First Amendment protects everything the co-workers say except for comments that can be construed as harassment.

The correct answer is “C,” which is a bit of a fudge, I think. I checked the First Amendment and I didn’t see where that was written. I think we can go ahead and just hang a lampshade on the real truth here — the answer is (B), we’re fucking slaves to these motherfuckers and we all should just shut up and try to get through the goddamn day without shooting up HR.

We go back to lawyer Chris after that, who notably does not comment about how fat the bad mother was. She goes on to introduce a video about some redneck asshole who hilariously gives his camel jockey co-worker a bunch of guff about the Muslim Brotherhood. All of Redneck Joe’s hate-filled dialogue is surprisingly erudite while his Muslim co-worker is portrayed as a waffling fool who can’t stick up for himself when the fact is he has about 6 inches on Joe and should probably just stand up and smash Joe’s head against the fridge. I think we’re supposed to walk away from this thinking that maybe Joe has a point. It’s awfully suspicious that the Muslim guy isn’t sticking up for himself. Maybe he is part of the Muslim Brotherhood! Maybe he is up to something!

We have no option, in the quiz at the end, to discuss Joe’s suspicions or theorize if there’s some larger context that would inspire Joe to pick on the suspiciously silent Muslim dude. We have to pick the answer marked as “correct” so we can hurry up and get back to lawyer Chris, who is now seated on a table in a courtroom with her awesome legs crossed and seems to expect us to take 25 minutes to read the statues for our “insert state here” harassment laws which are all like “Paragraph 8000 Subsection B-Stroke-37 therewith forsooth hither tither thee.”

Assuming we’ve just gone mad reading that, we click back to Chris — she’s moved closer to where the judge sits now and is kind of rubbing her breasts against the bench while she talks, her voice catching a little bit in her throat with this breathy sort of creaminess — and she tells us that the next video is all about retaliation. This video stars my favorite pair — Boss Bitch and Diane. We see them throughout the course in various situations and, strangely, they’ve actually ended up telling a little bit of a story by this point over the course of 17 one minute vignettes.

Diane has worked with a company for many years and she takes a promotion to a new department, where she brings her slovenly ways into the realm of her new boss — Boss Bitch. Initially, all is okay. We start out with a video unaccompanied by quizzes or narration where Diane and Boss Bitch are talking to each other on Diane’s first day and all is hunky dory. Then, later, Boss Bitch tells Diane that she needs to show up earlier — at 9am — each day, and her arrival time has been all over the place. An issue! Fair enough. Diane notes that Boss Bitch’s arrival time is also all over the place, and Boss Bitch replies, “This isn’t about me, it’s about you.”

So here we get the first big problem between the two. Diane eventually loses her cool and yells at Boss Bitch and, for the next several videos, is portrayed as an intractable problem employee. The head of HR, in one video, even calls Boss Bitch and makes fun of Diane. Curiously, Boss Bitch’s inability to show up on time, and HR being in bed with Boss Bitch, are not the problem. The problem is that Diane is “overreacting,” as the correct answer to one quiz says. You might as well just tell us that Diane should kill her soul and give up all hope.

Diane gets her comeuppance in the end, though. Boss Bitch, after being tipped off by HR that Diane really is a cunt, starts to ostracize Diane. Diane, left alone to her own devices, makes a few disparaging comments to the camera. She’s hot, so we agree with her. The quiz then asks us to describe how Boss Bitch’s retaliation was wrong. We’re given the description, so that’s easy. It’s important that we not think for ourselves.

We conclude with a long-winded summary from Chris — who is back on the table with her coyly crossed legs — cheerfully congratulating us on making it through the course.

I am proud to say that I am now fully educated and certified about how not to treat bitches, fags, camel jockeys, darkies, spics, fatties, and retards while in the workplace. I even get a fancy little laminated certificate that I can put up on the wall of my cubical next to the 1938 Volkswagen logo that’s very obviously a swastika.