Due to Legitimate Business Dealings, over the last few years I have worn shirts with several different logos and gone from being an employee of the main part of a small business to being a cog in a tiny Australian unit within a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a huge US-based company with more than 100,000 employees, all without changing the address of the building I work in.
This giant US company has standardised certain policies and other things, such that we are required to watch these really lame-arse corporate training videos, with a multiple-choice question to answer and the electronic version of a Read-and-Sign at the end. These are ‘produced’ in the US. I had to watch one of these videos this week, its subject was the company policy on the handling of data.
The question posed after the video was along the lines of, “it’s five o’clock on Wednesday afternoon and your boss needs you to have a report ready for him first thing Thursday morning. You haven’t finished it, but you have a family commitment in the evening that you cannot put off. What do you do?” The answers to choose from were:
- email the report to your personal email account and work on it after the family thing
- save the report to your Dropbox and retrieve it to work on it after the family thing
- save the report to a USB drive so you can take it home and work on it after the family thing
- after the family thing is finished, go back to the office, or use a VPN, to finish the report – the ‘correct’ answer (to keep the company’s data secure)
On reading these first thing I said to my workmates – not even half-jokingly – was, “clearly this is American, because there isn’t the Australian answer of ‘looks like you aren’t getting your report tomorrow boss, I’m going home now’”. Then we were again vicariously embarrassed for the actors who had to appear in these lame-arse videos in order to put food on their tables and went on with the day.
This morning, I was telling my wife (who works her arse off in academia) about the video over breakfast. I described the scenario and, before I could enunciate the question “what do you do” or the answer choices, she said “oh well, looks like the boss doesn’t get his report in the morning”.
All you Americans out there have my deep sympathies.