I’ve been doing this long enough now that I’m always a little surprised when something is ridiculous enough to shock me. That’s why I could only smirk when someone came by and asked me if I was going to training this morning. After explaining that I had just taken that training last month, my esteemed colleague looked around nervously before explaining that last month’s training covered me only for last fiscal year. This month’s training was required to cover me for the current fiscal year. By some fluke of scheduling it was just pure chance that the exact same class happened to get scheduled in back to back months.

Some people would find this odd, perhaps, but I’ve been a cog in Uncle’s machine long enough to know when I won’t get ahead by asking any more questions. This morning was one of those times and I dutifully went to the auditorium so they could update my now 42 day old certification. The snores coming from the guy beside me and the one two rows over fed into my hunch that I wasn’t the only one sitting here for the second time in as many months. Like the good troopers we are, we checked the box and hopefully won’t see this class for another 13 months.

So much for a productive morning.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.