In case you haven't figured it out, I date the entries from when the events occured rather than when I actually post them. I'm lax,  sorry.

On Monday management was sentenced to a sexual harrassment awareness and prevention seminar. Why? Well, once upon a time there was a young guy who worked with us. He wasn't much to look at, but he was an okay kid. 25, maybe. And we have an evil step-mother, I mean middle-manager, fifteen years older who liked him... really liked him apparently. He did not enjoy the attention, someone else got involved, snowball effect...

So even though the victim has since taken a position in another part of the company, we still had to deal with this issue, apparently by boring the hell out of us for an hour and fifteen minutes.

We speculated what would be covered. Perhaps tips like "ladies, do not sit on scorers laps while discussing student responses" or "gents, do not ask female scorers to stay after so you can give her a few pointers in private."

Nothing like that was on the curriculum, which is probably a good thing. Some of the don'ts are pretty strange though. No animal noises? No playing grab-ass? No asking "hey baby, give me a smile"? No invasion of personal space? The last one isn't going to fly - to do our jobs we have to invade people's personal space, or we wouldn't be able to see the responses on their screens! As Karen D said, "as long as you're not resting your breasts on their shoulder, is it really an issue?" heh.

Apparently the top ten reasons we should be vigilant against allowing sexual harrassment occur in the work place are dollar amounts ranging from 1.6 to 55.5 million dollars that various companies had to shell out in high profile sexual harrassment suits. Yeah, we're all wicked concerned about saving them money after they demoted us to save money. grr. Oh sure, they said they plan to "fix" things in September or October, but we're getting screwed now basically because someone complained that people should all be paid the same for radically different jobs - and they justify it under "equal work for equal pay" of all damn things! Sorry, I digress. 

The only interesting thing we learned from said seminar is that our company doesn't give a crap what people do together in their free time, as long as both consent to whatever the activities are.  That information could come in handy some day...

Basically, the biggest result of the seminar, is that we've been making stupid jokes about it since Monday. I hope they're happy!