Friday, September 01, 2006

Diversity training

Someone from my team is on leave at the moment and was meant to have gone to Turkey on holiday but as it turned out, was unable to go. Given the bombings there of late, she may now be relieved about that, but at the time probably not. She couldn’t go to Turkey because one day last week she was at a pub with her fiancé and some bloke started a fight, so they went over to try and break it up and they both ended up getting rather badly assaulted. The police reckon they know who did it and just need to track him down so they can arrest him. So much for having a nice break from work.

My landlady has continued her campaign to go through my underwear. I got home the other night and she had once again separated out my underwear and this time left them on the stairs – not in a provocative manner I might add, unless in the sense of provoking my wrath. Why would you leave someone’s underwear on the stairs? It just seems plain weird to me. Roll on the middle of October when she finally moves to Wales. I can’t remember if I have said before but I am wondering if she might ask me to have the cat. Her son said to me a while back that the cat isn’t going to Cardiff and although I could have just asked why not, I kind of didn’t get round to it. So, unless she plans to have the cat put down, my landlady must then need a new home for it, so I’m thinking she might ask me. Given the cat’s track record of lounging round not doing a lot apart from eating food and sleeping, I’m not sure whether I’m keen – I’m perfectly good at doing those things all on my own without having a cat to copy me.

This week I shall announce a new diversity award for making supportive and diversity aware comments at work. This was an overheard conversation between two colleagues where I work. One of them was Muslim and wearing a hijab headscarf and the other woman said to her “I love your headscarf, it must be so great never having a bad hair day”. Diversity training anyone? Although having said that I do work for an organisation that ran a diversity course once which seemed to suggest that you should treat people who are gay the same as people who are epileptic. I did ask if they were suggesting that if someone was gay you should therefore treat them like they have an illness and they basically replied that the way you deal with them would be no different. Hmm, interesting... Diversity training anyone?

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