Compliance training: the live blog

Some months ago I had to undergo some "training" through my contracting agency. Nothing useful was achieved but I believe it did serve it's purpose of covering the ass of whoever is gonna get the blame when they lose the contract to handle a bunch of the contract military employees in the DC area. It's not that they've done anything wrong. The job just gets rebid every other year. Nobody ever gets the job twice. But someone at the company is probably gonna take some grief for it and he wanted to prove that he did what he could.

Because they have employees spread all over the country we had to dial in to a conference call or get on via Skype or something.

9:45 - I dial in.

9:48 - Do I have any beer left? No? Crap. I didn't want to do this sober.

10:00 - They finally pick up the meeting.

10:04 - Speakerphones on both ends. [sarcasm]Just great sound quality.[/sarcasm] Only 5.5 hours of this ahead.

10:05 - I've talked to people who took the class yesterday. Believe me, they were not excited and nobody wanted to do it again. Don't bullshit us like that.

10:08-10:15 - Role call. People who can't see each other all claiming to be there. 3 layers of speaker phone and a mexican accent. Great.

10:16 - If you were a shoe what kind of shoe would you be? Yeah, everyone had to answer.

10:16-10:22 - a mess of people talking

10:22-10:29 - Talk about Agenda. Someone hit mute in the main room so it was quiet for most of that.

10:30-10:45 - break into groups... in a conference call

10:45-11:00 - lecture about how little they want to lecture at us.

11:00-11:11 - It's gone quiet. We're in another breakout group and I missed what I'm supposed to be talking to myself about. It's like second grade all over.

Oh, that was a break.

11:12 - Employee owned business. Employee owned business. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn't motivate me because you're just one of a string of contractors that have been hired to write me paychecks. In a few months you'll be nothing to me at all.

11:21 - oh, I'm supposed to be looking at that Powerpoint presentation that they posted on the intranet that I've never accessed before.

11:24 - what is that noise? Apparently people are being set on fire in the conference room. That or the agony of this talk is much worse in person.

11:34 - apparently just about everybody who works for the company (everyone but me) has a badge or a frock that says the name of the company on it. They're clearly labeled so nobody where they actually work will think of them as a real employee.

11:38 - don't date coworkers. No worries. There's a significant age difference between me and them.

11:45 - don't surf for porn on government computers. Don't make private calls on government phones.

11:48 - don't bring your own stuff into work. They may not let you take it home again and the company isn't gonna back you up.

11:50 - lunch

1:00 - repeat of lecture about how little they want to lecture us

1:15 - asked us to rat out coworkers

1:20 - talked about how they showed up to check on an employee who worked a lot of overtime and they went through his trash. He did a great job, but was stealing printer paper. Who is supposed to be the bad guy in that story?

2:00 - breakout sessions - all the people in your group are in a boat, but there's not enough room. One of you is getting thrown out. Who and why.

I'm calling in from home so my boat is just crazy small and I'm probably schizophrenic.

2:30 - They're explaining who got tossed.

By the time everyone had said something the meeting was over. I'll be glad when this company is gone.