Getting it off my chest

I’ve spent the last few days on a training course. Normally I love these things. I love the “Who are you & Where do you come from” introductions. I love the “contracting” with the trainer on our expectations of the course. I even love filling out the course review forms at the end. But I love these training courses because I am away from my office, and hence my e-mail and my telephone. No interruptions and a lot of time for reflection allow me to think. (And should, if I’m lucky, help me work through the creativity problem that I’m currently wrestling.)

This particular course however also brought up the one thing that I hate about training courses – the smug, arrogant and ignorant trainer. In my experience, most trainers are absolutely awe-inspiring. Alas, there tends to be a small number of quite offensive individuals also. And at the risk of sounding sexist, they are always male!

During our second day, each of the participants had to “report back” from our working groups on the main “learnings”. Standing up in front of a group of strangers and translating a rambling conversation into a series of flip chart bullet points isn’t easy. It is not easy for those of us not comfortable with public speaking. The trainer’s ease at talking off the cuff on any subject, only added to our sense of gauche. As he introduced the last reportee, he announced “…Last but by no means least, we have Sharon who takes it up the rear … oops … sorry about that Sharon”. Needless to say, the room that was hitherto full of mature adults, rapidly transformed into a group of puerile young men. A casual slip of the tongue that perhaps was more revealing about the tutor than the now red-faced reportee. Well I happen to have previous experience of this trainer and on the basis of two similar “deliberate gaffs” realise that he is now an ignorant pig. We’ve had the “I don’t smoke, back women or ride horses”, gratuitous picture of Scarlet Johansson and the random slide of the female nude accompanied by the “oops, one of the holiday snaps”. This lowlife even deliberately mishears a comment by one of the female that gets a round of applause and then makes reference to the “woman who got the clap”. The “George Bush as a monkey” and the “George Bush reading a book upside down are regular features of their presentations.
It’s just as well that we get to do a course assessment, so that I can tell him that his racist, misogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic gags are offensive. Now I can blog about him too!