TRAINING

Eleven and a half years on The Telegraph's news desk has made me an assiduous collector of grievances, both real and imagined. That might not be an attractive quality, but I get a special warmth from the indignation that comes from holding minor injustices close.

I also get an impulse to gorge myself whenever I get a chance to stick my snout in the company trough, and I gave free rein to that impulse last week when I was sent to Raleigh for online training. I saw this as an entitlement: "Have I not toiled for years in a thankless, low-paying, socially crippling job?! Yes, I have! Waiter! Bring me a month's worth of steak dinners, boxed for easy refrigeration! And charge it to the company! Better yet, charge it to the CEO!"

Actually, I was a little surprised the company agreed to send me someplace on its dollar, considering two prior events. In 1998, I was flown into Biloxi, Miss., on the Knight Ridder jet as part of a group of journalists that was sent in to help a sister paper after Hurricane Georges struck. The jet was a sweet ride, but its appearance was a little sullied after I spray-painted "Big John was here" in the cabin. In 2000, I was sent to Baltimore for a conference. My boss gave me her company card with one caveat: no porn charges. But apparently I rode that card hard enough without the hard-core thrills, and future excursions from The Telegraph's news desk were pretty frugal affairs.

Seven years and the knowledge that my co-workers had paid for my excesses had not improved me in the least. When I agreed to go to the training, I began negotiating like a two-bit shyster. I'm going to have to drive to Raleigh? Fine, I want to drive a car with a little flava, a Chevy Impala with 22-inch spinners, ground-effect neon and hydraulics. (I wound up getting a Chevy Cobalt. Black.) And if the company sees a $3,000 charge from Southern Charm Escort Agency, I want it covered -- no questions asked. (The company didn't even offer to spring for an inflatable doll.) So in the end, I wound up driving an economy car that had manual locks and windows ... but did have a CD player. It might have just been AM radio or a used CB radio had I not asked for so much more.

The hotel was a different matter entirely. It was one of those business traveler hotels that has mini-apartments instead of single rooms. It seemed to be styled on a Belle Epoch English hunting lodge and so was strewn with robust images of outdoor sport (fox hunting, duck hunting; hey, it takes a healthy dose of blood sport to create an empire) with faux Old Money touches. Some of the guests, however, were not of the stiff-upper-lip breed. "It's too cold in here! And the Internet is too slow!" howled a note left in the hotel's Executive Center (a room with two PCs with Internet access). Its plaintive tone sounded like a last note scrawled out by a doomed pioneer: "It's too cold in here, and the Internet is too slow. And so I die."

The shortcomings of the Executive Center were easily compensated by other amenities, namely the complementary beer and wine that were offered with food between 5 and 7 p.m. most nights. Frankly, this offering trumped any imaginable flaws. The hotel owners could have based its decor on a single-wide trailer park and still not had to worry about occupancy as long as the taps kept flowing. And there was no nagging about drinking responsibly; it was enabling of the purest sort.

Of course, I was not there to enter a co-dependent relationship with a hotel. I was there to be trained on the software The Telegraph uses to post its Web site. And in a stunning life-imitates-art twist, I wound up in Initech, the computer company in Office Space. Really. I was as though I had been pulled through the screen and immersed firsthand in the travails of Peter Gibbons. There were rows and rows of cubicles in which people were writing lines and lines of code. I thought of eavesdropping to see whether I could recognize any familiar banter and see whether such a species of office worker actually existed. That way I would be sure (as I suspected) that Office Space was more documentary than fiction. (For a second, I wondered whether I could lure these folks out of there cubicles by dangling a red stapler on a string, sort of like fishing, y'know.)

The training, however, left little time for pith-helmet anthropology. I had more productive things to do ... like sitting in a room for about eight hours and having little idea what the hell people were talking about. I mean, really, I was mystified. The last time I had seriously worked on the Web had been eight years ago, which makes me about as useful as an abacus in today's Web environment. But the instructors tried gamely to bring me up to speed with the others in the class (most of whom seemed to have no trouble grasping what was being taught). But I sat there a lot like this:

A dull, uncomprehending being. I liked the free food they kept bringing us, but I think the paper had higher hopes for me than just proving to other McLatchy papers that a Telegraph employee can spend hours in a digestive trance.

A free lunch cannot last forever, and so my training ended and I came back to Macon. I now have to show my bosses exactly what I learned and how I have improved my value to the company. Sadly, I think that will end with my head falling back and my tongue lolling out the side of my drooling mouth a la Homer Simpson and me saying, "Aaahhh, free beer."

kitty: The Mitten
photo and caption by: Melissa
I found it on ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.com