Religion, Anatomy and Politics

This post is about outrage. The first thing I'm outraged about pertains to two news stories that were back to back on Morning Edition (National Public Radio) yesterday. The first one was fairly endless. It concerned the show American Idol and this talentless contestant Sanjaya, who for some reason was still in the running. They interviewed all these different people who analyzed Sanjaya and what he and the show meant to pop culture and talked about how Howard Stern is trying to bring down American Idol by getting everyone to vote for him and blah blah blah.

I don't watch American Idol (except for the first three when all the freaks try out and embarrass themselves. I enjoy that) so I didn't really give a shit about this story, though I thought that they were delving a little deeper than necessary.

Then I heard what came after. As most of you know and all of you SHOULD know, Kurt Vonnegut died this week at the age of 84. His story followed Sanjaya's and was...get this...a third of the length. They played some snippets of interviews...mentioned his most famous novel and then moved on. Apparently Sanjaya is more important to the people than one of the last century's best authors ever. I was steamed.

I got called into the HR office yesterday. Apparently my group has been offending someone with our choices of topics. There were no specifics given. No instance pointed out. Just three groups of things that I have to tell my team not to bring up out loud anymore: Religion, Anatomy and Politics. I got pretty angry. In the 3+ years that I've worked here, we've always had an open forum to pretty much say what we want. We've had some fantastic debates in the room, always respecting each other's points of views and being able to laugh at anything. It was really one of the biggest perks about working here...believe me, there aren't many.

But there's been a lot of turnover lately, and new blood has entered the area. We all very easily narrowed it down to one new guy that I'm having trouble trying not to hate. Every time I see him now I want to shoot daggers at his too-pansy-to-email-me-about-being-offended ass with my hate-filled eyes.

I let HR know that giving us such subjective topics with no reference to anything specific not only makes it difficult to know what might have inspired the offense, but that it will be virtually impossible to know what not to say in the future. They acknowledged this, but said the person gave no specifics. Asshole. So now we're all paranoid about what we say.

Or at least we were yesterday. By 9:30 this morning, I'd already accidentally said "ass" out loud and someone else made fun of "firey pits of hell". Oops. You see what I mean, though? Do those things count as offensive?

I think I know what the first two issues may have been. We have a client that is a Christian retailer and their messages often have some hilarious products in them. Sometimes we read the descriptions out loud and laugh. So that's one.

Not long ago, I was reading aloud the blog of a certain Australian who had an article about an anti-rape device developed in South Africa that would essentially put little teeth in the penis of the assailant. I said the word "penis" out loud probably twice. So my guess is that's where the "anatomy" offense occurred. I guess correct medical terms for anatomy are offensive.

And the politics? Well, we're all pretty left leaning back here for the most part. That's common knowledge. I think we debated about Giuliani once. Hmmmm.

Those are the only occasions I can think of. Other than the fact that I swear like a sailor all the time. But everyone does. And this new guy...he does indeed have the essence of Catholicism about him...and he wears his glasses at the end of his nose. Asshole.

Have I mentioned that I hate this place? Happy Friday. I have something to confess to you all next week.

Someone has an entire coconut in the office refridgerator. It's been there for days.