September 01, 2004
Colossal Waste of My Time
It's a miracle that I'm here to write another blog entry, instead of at the hospital, having a self-inflicted sharpened pencil safely removed from my juggler. All-Employee Conference, thy name is Boredom.
I work for an insurance company. However, most of my co-workers, while remaining essential to the company, know nothing about insurance. They are accountants, I.T. nerds, finance experts, lawyers, HR gurus and support staff (a.k.a. secretaries). Granted, the lawyers and some of the accountants know basic insurance crap, but they're hardly experts.
So to whom did the management ship a dump truck full of money, to come and give us an 8-hour training session? These yabbos. Yes, I said eight hours. Eight hours of my life that I'll never get back.
To kill some time (but not nearly enough), I doodled, planned my meals and shopping list for the week, and wrote down the words/phrases in the lecture that I hated most:
1. Nuggets
2. Tyranny
3. Linkages
4. Sampler platter
5. Deployment
6. Plug 'n' play
7. Histogram
8. Whiz-bang
9. Actionable
10. Action item
Please, what the fuck is an "action item"? Isn't it an oxymoron, like verb noun? It makes no sense! And frankly, when I think "sampler platter," I think hot wings and potato skins, not insurance lectures. It was quite unfair to get my hopes up like that.
Then for the evening "entertainment" -- and I mean that in the loosest possible sense of the word - there was a hypnotist. Sebastian Black. Basically, a mortician with a speech impediment and a heavy New York Accent.
Christ, why didn't they just get a fucking mime if they wanted to continue with the Boring the Employees to Death?! Or a plate-twirling, balloon-animal-making clown, for God's sake?!