Yesterday, I had to drive to Eau Claire for a Success University Module. I may have mentioned these before. Fazuul has a series of four-hour seminars that all managers have to go through. Some of them are fairly useful. "Conflict Resolution" was a good one. "Serving Safe Food" was mostly obvious, but I understood why it was necessary. "Diversity," which is the one I did yesterday, was the biggest waste of time ever.

Sunday night, I was whining to Rijid. "Diversity is good. Discrimination is bad. See? I don't need to drive three hours to learn this."

But, since this is the year that Eau Claire is hosting the modules, and since I do technically need all the modules to be an RM, I had no choice.

(Last year, Madison was hosting the modules. I assumed this was how it was always going to be, because we're basically the flagship restaurant of the area. If I had known they went to a different part of the state every year, I would have insisted on doing more of them last year. Sigh.)

As suspected, "Diversity" was the lamest Success U. ever. First, I was amused to realize that Madison is really the most ethnically diverse restaurant in the area.

It's not their fault, of course. The way the state is divided, our area is us, and then a bunch of towns way up north. My high school was maybe about 10% not Caucasian. If the general population isn't minorities, you can't hire any. But it amused me nonetheless.

They were all, "Well, we have, um, high schoolers and, um, college students and ooh wait, a few senior citizens..." and I was all, "Whatever, dudes. I've got Hmong, Hispanics (not even JUST Mexicans, yo!), AND African Americans. Beat that, bitches!"

I didn't say any of this. I just sat there, feeling morally superior.

The workbook for Diversity was particularly lame. "Diversity is important in _____ workplace." I am not even kidding. The fill in the blank pages were missing the PREPOSITIONS. There are three other words in that sentence that a sane person would have taken out, but maybe that would have made it too hard.

There was one sort-of interesting exercise. We were shown 20 snapshots, and asked to rate how we feel about these people on a scale of 1-5. I ended up with mostly 4's for "Acceptance." There were a few truly scary looking people that I rated a 3 for "Tolerance." I felt kind of bad about it, but decided this was my prejudices in action. I would not immediately accept this person. I am learning a lot from this exercise.

It turned out that I was the most lenient of the group. Everyone else had given the scary people 1's and 2's, and picked up on a lot of things I didn't notice. One guy who I thought looked a little like Al Franken was given an average score of 2 because he had "child molester glasses." Wow. Some of us need the coke bottles, you know. PREJUDICE!!!

Then, we went through the photos again, and were read a short biography about each person. The overweight woman is extremely efficient and organized! The African American takes his grandmother to church every Sunday! The guy with long hair is a biochemist!

So, then we re-rated all the photos again. I was extremely bored, so some of my scores went down. A Christian, eh? What kind of Christian? Is he going to be all proselytizing me all the time? And the economics professor who brings a brown bag lunch every day? This is a restaurant I'm hiring for. That's just...weird.
***
So, then I was thinking. I'm not perfect. I have prejudices. If you say you're Christian in the first five minutes, I'm going to be a little freaked out. I'm biased against pretty sorority girls. I can't deal with morons. Don't even get me started on picky eaters.

But, now I've attended "Diversity," and I am a changed woman. Everyone deserves a chance. Except for the picky eaters. (Fazuulian scientists slaved for months to create that sandwich! It's good with tomatoes! You ruin it if you take them off!)

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