Equality and Diversity

I had to do an training course entitled 'Exploring Equality and Diversity' yesterday. All day. For six hours. For six hours, all day. Did I mention it was scheduled to last all day? I wasn't looking forward to it much as I figured the following would do just as well and would mean I didn't have to get up earlier than usual and then drive for 40 minutes through traffic jam after traffic jam and then have a nightmare finding somewhere to park and then realise I didn't have the right change so the motherbastarding machine took 30p more than it rightly deserved:

'Don't be racist'
'Ok'
'Don't be homophobic'
'... Allllright'
'Don't make fun of people in wheelchairs'
Tut. Sigh. Eye roll. 'Fine' [belligerence]

The end. That's all that is really required; 'be an adult instead of being a total dick '. Oh right. Be an ADULT, NOT a dick! It all seems so simple now!

However, despite me pouting from about 8pm the night before because GOD! I don't want to go do this piece of shit 'training' that I don't even need because I'm only homophobic when gays are around and am hardly ever racist and rarely openly mock the differently-abled and I've got work that I actually could be doing it turned out to be not nearly as awful as I thought it was going to be.

I got there half an hour early because, hello, I'm me. Although I berated myself for being such a loser eager beaver it turned out to be a good thing because I got to hear the most tragic-slash-hilarious story I've ever heard in my entire life.

I entered a room full of the trainers (as in people that do the training, not the Nike shop). One was chuckling at every sentence that left his mouth and I immediately didn't like him. There was a lady who looked like Anne Diamond (Nick Owen-era) and another man who had the very definition of 'wide-boy' down pat. He was not-so-subtly needling the chuckling man about all manner of things which only made Chuckles laugh more. It culminated in:
'Well you can see why his wife tried to kill him'. Chuckles chuckled. 'It's true!' said the younger Del Boy.
At this point, although I had been sat at the back of the room trying to studiously avoid being drawn in to the conversation my ears suddenly pricked up.

It would seem that Chuckles lived in a house with his second wife which had a trap door to the basement just past the front door. One day she unscrewed the trap door from its hinges, relaid the carpet and awaited his arrival home. He stepped into his house, fell through the floor but got stuck in the carpet.

And I lolled (silently, whilst pretending to read a book).

He then revealed that this had happened before he married her. And at the time he was a cop. And her dad was in prison. For stabbing a cop. And at the wedding, just after the dad had got out, someone made a lol-worthy comment about the plastic knives and forks at the buffet being plastic because the dad couldn't be trusted. So dada got out his flick knife and stabbed lollerboy.

'I guess I should have known then that it wasn't going to work out'. Yes. That might have tipped you off had her attempting to kill you TWICE (oh yeah, she tried again but we didn't find out how) hadn't tipped you off previously. Chuckles was, quite frankly, a sap. And I warmed to him.

All this knowledge was acquired before 9.30am. That is the start of a good day. Anything that begins with juicy, juicy gossip of a tragic nature is great. I'm happy from that point on. Eventually everyone else filed in and the training commenced, this is where things took a downturn because treating people with respect apparently is:
'political correctness gone mad'
and
'well we're bending over backwards too much nowadays for them alldon't you think' (emphasis mine. Who? WHO IS 'THEM'?)

I love the phrase 'political correctness gone mad'. It' second only to 'I'm not racist but...' in phrases I just ADORE to hear tripping off other people's tongues. Because, pretty much, no and no. So you can't go to work and call someone a poof anymore? Good. So you can't refer to people as 'golliwogs' anymore? Good. So you can't regale the office with your learned-off-by-heart Bernard Manning routine anymore? GOOD! These are good things! It is not 'mad', it is something that was required all along. I'm sorry that you now have to start taking other people's feelings into account when you walk into work and not be a dick anymore. That must be so tragic for you, to have to behave like a decent human being during the hours of 9 to 5. It's awful, I know. BUT (and here's the kicker) you're a dick. I am all for freedom of speech but you modify your behaviour depending on your audience. We all do it, all the time. People have the right to feel safe that they won't be discriminated against when they walk into their place of work. If that means you have to leave your Bernard Manning jokes at home then boo freaking hoo but they're there waiting for you when you get home just in time for you to don your white hoods and go stand round a bonfire somewhere. If you so choose.

Anyway, yeah, that got me a little riled. I said my piece and everyone nodded and 'mmm-hmmed' in agreement (because no one wants direct confrontation and was agreeing with everything said in that room. People are funny) and that was that. Lunchtime. I always like to discuss my thought and feelings about Carol Thatcher before lunch. Gets me hungry. For blood. Anyway, when we came back we had a talk from a guy from the Ethnic Minority something something service. He works with gypsies and travelers basically. The council effing LOVES giving ridiculously long titles to jobs, it loves it so much it wants to make sweet sweet love to long job title names all day long (my full job title is 'Children's Information Service Outreach Worker - Parent Information' for example). So yeah, although I had not thought that attending this training was going to do more than bore me, this guy completely reinvented my views about gypsies and travelers. Although I've never gone out of my way to badmouth travelers and Daily Mail coverage on them has always made me vaguely uncomfortable (Daily Mail coverage on anything makes me vaguely uncomfortable to be fair) I'd never thought about how our opinion (as a society I mean, but also yours and mine individual opinions I would wager) is comparable to how black people were treated in the American deep South in the 1960's. Or that comments made by Himmler about gypsies were not a million miles away from comments made by Jack Straw just 10 years ago on the same topic. This sort of 'they're dirty, they steal, I wouldn't want them living near me' has only one end point and it's not good. It's the sort of end point that ends up with 2 million people gassed to death just because of their heritage. I had never, ever thought of it like that before. It freaked me out I was so happy to implicitly condone such racist attitudes and hadn't realised how sick it was. So I got juicy gossip, a chance to soapbox and then had my mind blown all in the course of one day.

I guess the moral of the story is always keep an open mind. And don't be a dick.