Tales from the Steppes

2005-03-14

10:47 a.m.
Drop your bombs between the minarets, Down the casbah way

In about 15 minutes I have to attend a Diversity Training meeting for our entire division. While I am a big believer in diversity, somehow I don't think this 1 1/2 session is going to change anyone who doesn't already get it. And an hour and a half is a long time to sit in a meeting like that and not laugh.

My team tried to get out of it, reasoning that we were pretty damn diverse to begin with. Apparently that is not good enough. So then we were talking about wearing "colorful native garb" to the meeting. Khalid could wear his Pakistani wedding attire, which is truly fantastic. And Fred was going to try and find a dashiki, preferably with the Harvard logo on it. Kathy was going to make a skirt out of the green felt tablecloth as mandatory Irish wear. It is good to have sick coworkers.

Of course, we offended a good number of people surrounding us - certainly not politically correct. Sigh. Guess we'll just burn in hell. Perhaps this incident will allow us to take the "Rudest Team on the Platform" title away from Eastern County. Maybe if we bring drinks and snacks to the meeting.

Of course, Eastern County is pretty hard to top. Every year we have a holiday party and all of the teams set up food and drinks in their pods and people travel around and eat and visit. Eastern County puts out cheese and crackers and then leaves to go out to lunch.

Oh well. Gotta go pretend to be interested.