It is official. I go to work Thursday night as usual and then don't go home until Friday afternoon due to this annual Holiday GMT. It has to be one of the longest and most ridiculous training sessions the Navy has to offer. Allow me to give you the run down of last year's marathon of pain. It began innocently enough with 30 minutes of explaining what was going to happen and when. Then we went into Sexual assault training. It wouldn't have been so bad except that the lady giving the lecture (and it was a lecture) accused every guy in the room of rape, multiple times, over the course of an hour. The next hour wasn't any better as a different lady explained that every guy in the room was guilty of domestic violence, we just hadn't been caught yet and that if we were accused we were guilty until proven innocent. The next hour was taken up by the command anti alcohol squad explaining the perils of drinking and what was available to all of us addicts out there to help us find a cure. Little did we know that this was just a fore shadowing of what was to come. We got released for a one hour lunch (which is kinda hard to do when 300 people simultaneously assault the 4 food joints within striking distance).
When we got back the CO talked to us about what was going on and his thoughts for the next 45 minutes. This was then followed by the most annoying 3 hours of the day. It began with a Sheriff's department representative who, over the course of an hour, explained the DUI laws and gave about 4 stories of drunk driving cases that ended tragically along with graphic photos (just the thing to see right after a greasy meal).
Next up was what we here in the office call simply "creepy lady." To be fair, this lady lost her son to a drunk driver. What got to us, wasn't the fact that she talked for an hour about him and the incident, it was the fact that through out the story and lecture, she stood there petting a tennis shoe. It wasn't until the end of the lecture that we discovered that the shoe had belonged to her son, just to make sure we were thoroughly creeped out.
We had now sat through 2 hours of drunk driving stories given by people who thought the best way to convince a bunch of sailors not to drink and drive was to either gross them out or try and make them cry. And then..., we got Handy Al. I don't think that is really his name, I just remember this guy in a wheel chair with no legs and one arm that pointed out that a ball cap with those clapping hands on it was his handy cap. Anyway, he spent the next hour explaining just how much of a drunk and druggie he had been and the drunk driving (yes a 3rd hour of anti-DUI lectures) incident that took his legs and arm. It probably would have been moving and interesting except for the fact that it was well into the afternoon, we were tired of being called drunken wife beating rapists, and that the room was now hot and filled with the smell of sweat, farts, and McDonald's. In other words, we just wanted to go home. To bad we still had an hour of Don't Ask, Don't Tell training that was about as informative as a blank piece of paper. This is the time of day that a smart person remains quiet when the lecturer asks, "are there any questions?" To bad there were a bunch of idiots in the room. So, yes, it was extended for another 30 minutes as people had to ask questions that had already been answered or couldn't be answered.
All I got to say is, "I hope it goes better this year." At least there won't be a DADT lecture at the end and hopefully they learned from last year that 4 hours of anti-DUI training was a bit excessive. I doubt it, but I can hope.
Well, thanks for letting me vent and reading my blog. Have a great day and yadda, yadda, yadda.
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