The Getaway

As we shuffled into the conference room for our beginning-of-tour meeting, I could see the tell-tale blue glare of the television. Uh-oh. Sensing another intolerable video, I hung back and went in last, dragging a chair in from the neighboring conference room and sitting by the door. I made sure that the door was chocked open, since if it closed, only a supervisor's badge would open it.

The supervisor at our meeting had already watched the video an hour earlier, so he would be leaving shortly. I made sure to sign the training sheet, which I had forgotten to do last time. Then, I waited for the supervisor to pick up the sign-in sheets and take them back to the training room. Sure enough, it was the same annoying blonde woman in the video. I heard the door to the workroom floor open and then click shut.

I counted slowly to 20, then scooted my chair into the doorway and then backwards. Silently, I pushed the chair back into the other room, then stealthily moved past the training room. I darted around the corner and to the door. I opened it, stuck my head out and looked left and right: The coast was clear! Whistling the theme music from "Mission: Impossible," I hotfooted it out of there and made a beeline back to my machine. Total time wasted: Five minutes, which was 25 minutes less than everyone else. I felt a sense of euphoria over my flawless escape. In fact, I had a warm fuzzy feeling about it for the next couple of hours. I probably should have thanked them for enabling me to do something that made me feel so good.

And then it turned out that the supervisor had shown the same part of the video again that had already been shown on Wednesday! (Although I only learned that later, not having been there myself.)

I talked with one of my female co-workers about the video, and she noticed the gender gap in the reaction to the video. "All the guys hated it, like it was nails on a chalkboard," she said. "Most of us women said, 'Oh, it's not that bad,' but then it was more of a subject that interested us." Exactly.