Yea training videos

Today I had to attend a two-hour "orientation" meeting about benefits, even though I've been working at my new job for more than three months now. And, since they had all of us "new" employees trapped in one place at the mercy of the human resources gods, it was deemed that we should watch some crappy training videos – you know, to really get us pumped about working.

I'm pretty certain that one of the training videos I was subjected to was the exact same video I had to watch 8 or 9 years ago when I first started working as a busser at Chi-Chi's Mexican Restaurant during high school. It was about those guys at the Seattle fish market who throw the fish. And they have so much fun doing it, too.

As the fish-throwers spouted off a myriad of platitudes about how great it is to throw and catch fish for a living, and how everyone can love their jobs as long as they have a good attitude (smile, meatpackers – your job wouldn't suck so bad if only you had a better attitude about gutting cows), I started to get an eerie sense of deja vu. And then it dawned on me – I had been subjected to the exact same video almost 10 years earlier before starting a crappy minimum-wage job involving scraping people's half-eaten food scraps into the garbage. One decade and a college degree later, I still can't avoid the sub-standard training videos.