what Chris Parnell and Vincent D’Onofrio have in common

Today I attended the mandatory motivational training arranged by the big boss in my office for all of us minions. In fairness, he attended as well and even sat in the very first row in the closest spot to the motivational speaker, who looked like a cross between Chris Parnell and Vincent D’Onofrio (of SNL and MIB/L&O CI fame, respectively). Unfortunately, the result was not nearly as hilarious as you’d expect. Instead, all we got was the big head and awkward head movements without the alien humor or the bombastic wit of “Lazy Sunday”.

I must confess a bad attitude going in. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of sitting through 7 hours of ‘motivation’ at the hands of some joker whose credentials included working for several Fortune 500 companies and the phrase “former stand-up comedian”, especially when I knew that I could have skipped out of this trap earlier, if only I’d been properly forewarned. As it stands, all I got was a smart-ass grin as my supervisor whisked out the door yesterday. “You know we have that mandatory training tomorrow, right?” he asked. I said yes, and assured him that I was going. “Good,” he said, “I’m going to ‘motivate’ myself from home—have fun tomorrow.” Ass. I hope there’s a fucking quiz on Monday.

Anyway, despite my conviction that I would have no fun whatsoever and my fear that I would be chosen out of the crowd to perform some humiliating trust exercise in which I would have to catch/be caught by co-workers who have not yet had the opportunity to meet me, the experience was not completely devoid of substance. For one, it was kind of funny—at least until the speaker ran out of good material an hour into our motivation. At one point, whose context I am not able to recall, he asked us what Michael Jackson and Tanya Harding have in common, besides the fact that they’re both probably women, hahahaha. Tentative answers escaped the crowd from all around, but the most interesting came from directly behind me: “They’re both athletes,” someone murmured with complete sincerity. Wow, I thought, today could actually turn out really well.

But the best moment was not a humorous one, but rather educational. It involved an overly long story that went something like this:

Jim’s garbage disposal stops working so he calls the plumber to fix it. The plumber arrives soon afterward, in his beat-up van, lousy hair and less-than-flattering low-riders. He reaches into the garbage disposal and pulls out banana peels and beer cans, finishing the job quickly. Before leaving the house, he tells Jim not to ‘put anything weird’ down the disposal again, and even calls the next day to make sure that it’s still working. It is. The End.

Then the speaker asked that each group of participants rate the plumber’s performance on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest. A few minutes later he went around the room to collect the answers. By far, the most popular answer was 4, with many 5s thrown in for good measure. Besides the group of engineers who (for unexplained reasons) rated him a 1, my group was the only low score (3) and that was only because my vote for 2 dragged our average down. After the vote everyone spent the following minutes extolling the virtues of the plumber, who not only showed up for the job but also fixed the problem in record time. Only one lonely female voice articulated my concern, piping out of a sea of uniforms—“But he didn’t address the root of the problem—so how could he have fixed it?” Her question was ignored and the subject changed without further discussion.

Now, I don’t remember the purpose of the exercise—something was briefly mentioned about a second, more attractive plumber whose quality of work was not elaborated on—but the sense of horror that washed over me at the general acceptance of such a crappy fix for a problem (especially considering the ongoing lesson in Iraq) will stay with me always. The other trauma I suffered today was realizing that my boss most reminds me of a gleeful 5-year-old kid with red juice stain all around his mouth. I could feel his radiating delight at the speaker’s risqué jokes all the way across the room. Now that I’ve seen him giggle like a little girl, I’m not sure I will ever look at him the same way again.

When we broke for lunch I had reached my mental suffering saturation point, so I cut my losses and headed home for my personal brand of motivation—naptime and Spin City re-runs. Let the healing begin.