performance adjustment

well, i apologise to those of you who have already heard this rant, but for those of you who haven't, i hope you enjoy it... i just spent the past two days in a training mandated by my agency.... we spent the first day talking about relationships, the crisis cycle, and conflict resolution... all topics covered in, oh, i don't know, kindergarten... so far, pretty typical to every other agency mandated training ever attended since the beginning of time... no problem, but today, we did the "technical" part... just to give you an idea of how this was going to go, the instructor asked me what i would do if someone came at me with a knife. the proud little budding martial artist in me knows what to do, so i said i would stab him with it... when he told me i would have a short career, i answered, but i'll be alive to get a new job.... he wanted me to say run, which is all fine and dandy if you have somewhere to run to (if say, you aren't cornered) or if you have a chance of outrunning this nut with the knife (and your legs aren't 1 and a half inches long each-like mine)....

they taught us some grab defenses (mostly silly silly defenses) all based on the never stated, but clearly understood basis that it is more important to keep the client safe than yourself. they taught us a defense for a hair pull, this one was my favorite! if someone grabs your hair, you anchor their hand to your head (so far, this makes sense) but after you anchor it, you wait until they get

wait for it

wait for it

TIRED and then you pull your hair out of their hand "strand by strand if you have to"....

what? i'm sure i didn't hear that correctly, you mean i wait for them to get, what, tired? and then pull my hair out of their hand strand by strand? are you kidding??? no, you're serious? what?

and they made us gallop around the room to show that we could stay in our "stance"... oh the humiliation! and we had to take 7 tests (covering literally about 400 pages of material that we barely skimmed) and we had to get 100% on all the tests to pass.... this would have been a daunting task if we hadn't read the tests out loud together and decided on all the answers together, and if we hadn't just taken a pre-test 5 seconds earlierwith the book (and again with each other's help and input) and all the questions were exactly the same.... despite all that, one kid still got answers wrong and when we corrected them (yes, like in grade school when you correct your buddy's test) we were supposed to correct the answer and then initial it. these corrected and initalled answers were called...... you guessed it....

PERFORMANCE ADJUSTMENTS and still counted as 100%!

i'm starting to think that this may have been a waste of my time... what do you think?