Training

First week, training:

I didn't record the details of our training, but there were a number of highlights. The training basically involved a lot of beating around the bush and mindless hours of going around in circles. There is one lady named Dorothy who insists on asking every single possible combination of scenario about what could befall us in the course of our job. I understand her wanting to be fully prepared, but she is incredibly annoying. I find myself siding with the various sassy black ladies who make hmmpf noises or groan every time Dorothy breaks in to ask some goddamn stupid question. We have two very old senior citizens who are having a really hard time learning how to operate the hand held computer. We had to swear an allegiance to the Constitution and to defend it “against all enemies foreign and domestic.” Very impressive.

Our team leader is nineteen years old and checks his phone literally every few minutes—updating his myspace or something, I'd guess—and anytime anyone asks a question, he tells them he will have to check with his boss. He defers to his second in command, who is an older woman who seems to actually have some idea what she's doing, and sometimes disappears for hours at a time. I find this somewhat worrisome.

A police officer comes around to tell us what to do if we run into some trouble—a lot of my coworkers are very concerned that we might be sent to The Ghetto—and we come away from this talk not really learning much. I make the following note, which encompasses everything I learned:

--everyone is a suspect

--everyone is a victim

--when in doubt, kill dogs

At one point someone actually says, out loud, to the group “there's no 'I' in team” and my immediate thought was “no, but there is a u and I in murder suicide.”

Toward the end of the training, we are given index cards to write our names and addresses on. The second in command team leader asks us to write on the back of the card something, if we had only a month to live, we would do. One of our team members, a dude of about twenty, writes “love on my puppies.” Because he loves his dogs. I find this both really sweet and hilarious.

Two things I overhear during the class:

“Everyone's different because of our generics and stuff.”

“My sister in law broke into my house and stole my baby's ADHD medicine.”

And then we are sent out into the world. This will be a weird job.