Training Day

One thing they like to do to employees in the corporate world is to train us, as if we were circus animals.

I have all sorts of training certificates buried somewhere in the rubble on my desk. I have been trained in CPR, safe driving, ethical behavior, even diversity (Did you know we’re not all the same?).

For the past week, I have been undergoing new employee training. Keep in mind, I have been working here since 2002. But, it was only a year ago that I was made an official employee, after being a contractor. Hence, I am a new employee.

The first day, I was kept in a room and made to watch a lot of Power Point presentations. Nothing stimulates the mind like a good Power Point. Or seven.

Then, I went to safety training. This was also a positive experience, as I got to watch a number of videos, including one entirely about ladders. OK, I’m being facetious. It was about stairs, too.

Did you know that there are 17,000 ladder-related accidents annually in the U.S.? Neither did I. A couple of nuggets I gleaned from the video were “never use a ladder as anything but a ladder,” and “each trip up and down a set of stairs is a new adventure.” I take the elevator every day, so I’m not sure how much this is all going to help me. But I have scrapped my plans to use my ladder as a sailboat.

We saw a video on automobile accidents, which reminded me of when I was in ROTC in high school. On days when outdoor activities got cancelled, they would show us uplifting movies with names likes “Mechanized Death” and “Wheels of Tragedy” in order to scare us to death for when we actually started driving.

One of the safety trainers really kept me off balance, because I never knew when or if he was joking. He told us that he had never rented a DVD or a VHS movie, and the last movie he saw at the theatres was “Jaws.” Not relevant, but interesting. He didn’t really explain his reasoning. I suspect he’s a Mennonite.

He showed us one picture of a van that had been in an accident on Interstate 16 in Georgia. He told us that the van had careened off the road, and gone into a field, and somehow had hit the only pine tree for miles around. If that wasn’t irony enough, then he said, “And do you know what this guy did for a living?”

I didn’t.

He said, “He was a forester.” Wait, am I supposed to laugh? What are the odds? Then he said, “Of course, this was a fatality.” Oh, so I don’t laugh. I don’t think Mr.-never-watches-a-movie would like me laughing. He’d already scolded me once for checking my Blackberry during a video, saying we could all go “check our little e-mails during the next break.” I bet he’s never read one of those, either.

Later on, we learned to use a fire extinguisher. I’m not sure all this safety training was necessary. Nobody is going to die in the office where I work, except of boredom.

The rest of the week wasn’t nearly as interesting. One day, I toured a big call center where they sit and listen to people who haven’t paid their bills on time bitch and moan all day. It was one of those excruciating tours where they show you, for example, the water fountain, and say, “This is our water fountain.” And so on.

I have two more weeks of this stuff. And then, hopefully, I’ll be prepared and ready to take on the job that I’ve already been doing since 2002. And if by chance I have to climb a ladder, I’m ready.

Hair-raising ordeal

I got my haircut today, which should be a pretty boring event, but it turned into something of an ordeal.

I’ve been rocking this same hairstyle since I was about 10 years old. I figure, if something works, why mess with it? There was one brief period in high school when I flirted with the “part down the middle” look that was popular at the time, but I have since burned every picture of me from that era, and destroyed the negatives. The ’80s were a pretty horrific time.

Many years ago, when I lived in Griffin, Ga., I got my hair cut at an old-fashioned barber shop. There were two men there who cut hair, and I never paid more than $7 for a haircut. They didn’t shampoo it, they didn’t blow-dry it, they didn’t put gel in it, they just cut it. It took about 15 minutes, and they talked about hunting and fishing the whole time. You paid them, gave them a $1 tip, and you were on your way.

One of the guys was named Vern, and you had to be careful with him, cause he didn’t ask how you wanted your hair cut, he just took out the scissors and went to town (“Vern’ll skin you,” my mama used to warn me). They finally let a woman join them, and after my initial trepidation, she turned out to be my favorite, since she cut my hair in about 5 minutes, with no small talk, and she always did a good job, and she called me “Baby” when she was finished. I tipped her $2.

I have to get my hair cut pretty often, because it grows fast. If I go more than a month between haircuts, I look like a Chia pet. I’m not complaining, as I know men my age whose hairlines are retreating like the French army. It may be turning grayer than a Confederate uniform, but it’s yet to show any sign of turning loose.

Anyway, today, I went into a local Fantastic Sam’s, which is always a crapshoot, because they have a turnover rate of about 100 percent per week, and you never know who you’re going to get. I went in, signed my name, and waited my turn.

As I was thumbing through the latest issue of Working Mother magazine (A new plan to shrink belly fat!), my attention turned to the center of the salon. There was a redneck woman there, waiting on her mama, who she had brought to get her hair fixed (when women reach a certain age, they don’t get their hair cut anymore; they get it “fixed”). Then the redneck woman got a call on her cell phone, and the conversation grew quite contentious, and all of us in the barber shop got to hear it.

I didn’t take detailed notes, but it seems the gist of the problem is someone named Rebecca was making demands on the redneck woman’s time, and she didn’t like it. Apparently, Rebecca was trying to arrange some plans that would enable her to catch the latest episode of “Survivor,” and redneck woman was feeling a bit put out.

“I’ll tell you this, Rebecca, I’m getting there at 1:30. You ain’t gonna rush me. You can just miss "Survivor" one time, it won’t kill you.” She was carrying on this conversation at roughly the same decibel level as a Deep Purple concert, and it just went on and on. “Now, I’ll tell you one thing, you ain’t gonna mess up my vacation. I’m on vacation that week.”

As I wondered what sort of job this woman could possibly be on vacation from, her mother (let’s call her Redneck Grandma) chimed in with a few “I know that’s rights”, and I knew I had to leave. I got up and told the poor woman who was about to come call me back for my haircut to take my name off the list, as I could not handle anymore of the trailer park soap opera. She looked at me a little surprised, but I’m sure she understood.

Here’s what we have to do – we need to ostracize and shame public cell-phone talkers the same way we did smokers. Give them little designated areas where they can carry on conversations, but prohibit them everywhere else. Just as smoking laws are designed to protect people from second-hand smoke, we need to protect people from second-hand conversations. It’s a matter of public health, because eventually, somebody is going to get killed by an irritated bystander.

All’s well that ends well. I went to another Fantastic Sam’s, and got a nice haircut, but only after waiting 10 minutes as the guy sitting next to me was immersed in a long business call on his cell-phone, something involved an order of white cheddar cheese

There oughta be a law.

Running on empty

I did something kind of dumb the other day – I went ahead and registered to run a half-marathon.

Since the race is only about 5 weeks away, I suppose it’s time to ratchet up my training. By “ratchet up”, I mean start.

I have one of those training schedules I printed off the Internet and it calls for an 8-mile run this weekend. I can do that. Depending on your definition of “running.”

Why do I do this sort of thing? I don’t know. I’m one of those people who needs motivation to exercise. Since I eat like a feral hog, if I didn’t exercise they’d put a picture of Snoopy on my side and fly me over sporting events.

Also, my cholesterol tends to get higher than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The last time I had blood work done, the nurse called me and said, “Whoo, boy, you got a lot of things wrong with you.” So I decided right then and there to exercise more. And to not ever get blood work done again.

The last time I trained for a long race, it didn’t go so well. It was about three or four years ago, and I saw a notice in a local gym that there was a running group getting together a few nights a week to train for the Chicago Marathon. I didn’t want to run the Chicago Marathon, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt me to go run with this group and improve my overall physical fitness.

So I get there, and I’m the only man in the group. I remember telling my wife later that I was running with a bunch of younger women, and she just said, “Don’t pull a muscle.” This is what happens when you hit 40. You lose your air of danger.

We were going to do about a three-mile run, and I thought, great. I’ll have to jog really slowly so I won’t embarrass these girls. Then we got started, and they ran off and left me like I was hitting on them in the singles bar. That was embarrassing enough, but then about halfway through one of them doubled back to come check on me and see if I was OK! I explained to her that I had an old Vietnam War injury that was flaring up, but I’d be all right.

I finally got to where I could sort of keep up with them, but then I missed a couple of weeks, and joined them one Saturday for a long run on the Silver Comet Trail, which is west of Atlanta. It’s a long, flat trail, perfect for biking and running, and the girls were going to do a 15-mile run. Well, I knew I wasn’t in shape enough for that, so I figured I’d just go about 10, and wait for them to finish.

On that trail, you run out to a certain point, and then you turn around and run back. I got to about the 5-mile point, and I thought, hey, I feel pretty good. No need to turn around. I can’t get these girls outdo me. I’ll do a little bit more. Hit the 6-mile mark, and figured, what the heck? I can do this. So I ran all the way to the 7.5-mile mark and turned around, meaning I was going to do the whole 15 miles. The male ego is a wonderful, yet terrible, thing.

With about five miles to go, I realized I had made a huge mistake. It’s probably the same feeling Paul McCartney had the first time he heard himself singing The Girl Is Mine with Michael Jackson on the radio. I was in trouble.

My legs felt as if they had been encased in concrete. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, my pride hurt. And, there was no way out. There are no places to stop along the trail, nowhere to go for help. You just have to get back to where you started from. The last two miles, I would drag myself for about 100 yards, stop, then do it again. I looked like Jack Nicholson toward the end of "The Shining".

The girls gave me looks of pity mixed with impatience when I limped back to the parking lot. One of them suggested perhaps we should ride up in separate cars the next time. I assured them there would be no “next time.”

So, wish me luck these next five weeks. I don’t even have a running group to embarrass me this time. But I’m perfectly capable of doing that all by myself.

In search of Bubba

So I heard somebody on TV the other day talking about the “Bubba” vote, and I listened with disinterest, until my wife pointed out that they were talking about me.

Now hang on a minute. I’m not a Bubba. Am I?

I went and looked it up. Apparently, the Bubba vote refers to white (check), working-class (check), mostly rural (not so much) voters. But those are really code words. I think what they mean by the Bubba vote is the redneck vote.

They mean the kind of guy who walks out of a Larry the Cable Guy concert and says, “I wish I was as smart as him.” They mean the kind of guy who takes his wife to Wal-Mart for a chili dog for their anniversary dinner. They mean a guy who wears sleeveless shirts to church.

That’s a Bubba. And I’m not one of those.

I’m not saying I’m not related to some. And I might do a Bubba-like thing here and there. I know all the words to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” I’ve been known to bark at a football game. I consider Chili’s a fancy restaurant. I have a tan-line that stops just above my elbow. I’ve eaten potted meat for dinner.

Jethro Bodine? He was a Bubba. So were Junior Samples and Gomer Pyle and pretty much everybody on the Dukes of Hazzard except for Daisy (she was a hubba-hubba, not a Bubba). But I’m not a Bubba. I’m pretty sure about this.

I did get called a dumb hillbilly once, in Boston, when I was negotiating with some fellows on the street for some Red Sox tickets. The guy didn’t want to tell me exactly where in the stadium the tickets were located, so I told him what he could do with them, and what I said wasn’t nice, so he called me a dumb hillbilly, and I called him a stupid Yankee, but cooler heads prevailed and order was restored. I wound up getting in the game for free anyway, so who’s the dumb hillbilly, huh?

Don’t answer that.

Frankly, the whole “Bubba vote” thing is offensive. I don’t think we’d stand for using a stereotypical name to group other categories of voters, like women, or black people, or Hispanics, or strippers (you never hear about the “Diamond vote”).

Whatever. Call me what you will. I’m secure in my non-Bubbaness. As Popeye once said, “I yam what I yam.” Or maybe that was Jethro.

Impossible to forget

Today is the anniversary of one of those days when something happened so momentous that we always remember where we were when we heard the news.

I was at home on Sept. 11, 2001, unemployed, doing a little freelance work. I was scheduled to have a phone call with a woman from the state peanut board to discuss a speech I had written for her. Yes, you’ll do anything when you don’t have regular income coming in.

I spent my day like pretty much everybody else in America, watching the TV reports, talking to family and friends, going through the feelings of fear, incredulity, outrage and sadness. My kids were in elementary school and they knew what had happened, but they were too young to really comprehend it. I remember that afternoon watching them, my son playing football with his friends, my daughter jumping on the trampoline, and wishing I could be that carefree and oblivious again.

I once went to the top of one of the Twin Towers. What an unbelievable view it was from up there. The last time I was in New York City many years ago, I tried to talk my wife into going to the top, but she had no interest. So we took a subway ride instead, which trust me, was much scarier than being high above the city.

The first real big news happening in my life that had the “I’ll always remember where I was when I heard it” importance was when Elvis Presley died. I was in the backyard playing Whiffleball and my mother stuck her head out the window to tell me.

I wasn’t much of an Elvis fan at that age, so I wasn’t too upset, but my mom had never told me something like that before, so I figured it was a big deal. Now, a couple of months later, when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashed and Ronnie Van Zant died, I DID get upset. That was a big deal.

I was watching Monday Night Football on Dec. 8, 1980. I turned the game off and was listening to the radio to help me fall asleep, and the first song I heard was Strawberry Fields Forever. Then came In My Life. The DJ then started talking about the death of John Lennon, and my heart sank. I turned the TV back on to hear Howard Cosell confirming what I had just heard.

I remember the day Ronald Reagan got shot. I had just come home from school and I was watching one of those goofy Beatles cartoons they used to show on Channel 36 out of Atlanta. I even remember that on that day’s episode, the last song they played was Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby, the Beatles’ version of the old Carl Perkins song.

Then I changed channels, and the Reagan shooting was all over the news. I watched for a little while, saw that he was not going to die, and resumed daydreaming about high school girls.

It was bitterly cold the day in 1986 when I left class at the University of Georgia and walked into my apartment and turned on the TV, only to see pieces of metal falling into the ocean. The space shuttle had exploded, and it was really a traumatic thing for the country. My last class of the day was canceled that afternoon.

It’s funny how some of those things you wish you could forget never leave you. I often have forgotten what I had for lunch by the time I sit down for supper, but I’ll always remember where I was when I heard about all of those terrible things. I'm sure you will, too.

Mmmmmmmmmmm

Fall is almost here, and on the one hand that’s bad news, because it means winter is coming along right behind it.

But there is a silver lining, which is that yesterday I saw my first pomegranate in the grocery store. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.

I have loved these things for many years. I like to get a great big one and spread some newspaper out in front of me and go to town. It takes a good 20 minutes to eat one, and the sheer volume of what you consume is not very much, since you’re just getting the juice from around the seeds. But it’s worth the effort.

Pomegranates are all the rage now, or more specifically, pomegranate-flavored things are the rage. But that stuff doesn’t really taste like pomegranates, just like cherry-flavored stuff doesn’t taste like cherries, grape-flavored stuff doesn’t taste like grapes, and so on. Why can’t we do some research on this? We can put a man on the moon, but…..

Pomegranates are messy to eat. The red juice stains your fingers and teeth, and my wife tries to dissuade me from eating them on the bed, but I’ll sneak one up there every now and then when I’m watching TV. Some guys leave the toilet seat up, I eat pomegranates in the bed. Nobody’s perfect.

When Allie was only a year old, she got into one that I had left spread out on some newspaper on the floor. When we discovered what she was doing, she was red as a beet from head to toe and sticky as a fly-trap, but she had a big smile on her face. We had to soak her for about half an hour to get her clean.

There was a big pomegranate bush at my father’s house that would produce about 15-20 big ones a year. I checked on those things religiously, from the time the little red flowers popped up until they were ready to pick and began to burst open. I babied those things, chasing the bugs away, looking for worm holes, giving them verbal encouragement.

One year the bush was overflowing with nice, big, red juicy ones. They were about a week from being ready, and my girlfriend at the time had a younger brother who was a bit of a redneck, and he wanted to go down to my parents’ place in the country so he could shoot his gun.

OK, I said, so I took him down there, and told him to make sure to fire toward the woods, and nowhere near the house nor the road. My girlfriend and I were in the house, and in about 15 minutes I heard loud booms, one after another. I said, “I think your idiot brother is shooting the gun near the house,” so I headed out to stop him and take the gun away.

I saw him walking toward the house, and I said, “I told you not to shoot near the house. What were you doing?” He said, “I didn’t hurt nothing, I was just shooting at those apples on that tree.”

Well, I guess that’s not so ba – wait a minute. We didn’t HAVE an apple tree. I began to run toward my pomegranate bush, screaming “nooooooo”, like one of those slow-motion scenes in the movies, when somebody realizes a loved one is dead.

Sure enough, all that was left on my pomegranate bush was the stems. The little son-of-a-bitch had blown them all away. I still regret sometimes that I didn’t go get his gun and kill him right then and there.

Pomegranates have much history and wide appeal. Some Jewish people eat them on Rosh Hashanah. Paintings of the Virgin Mary show her holding pomegranates. Islam teaches that pomegranates grow in the garden of paradise. The fruit figures prominently in the Greek mythology story of Persophene.

But I just like them cause they taste good. Here’s to the next four months of messy, sweet, sticky, red-stained pleasure.

As bare as they dare

I went up to Athens this weekend to watch the Georgia Bulldogs play football, and it was a good time. The Dawgs won, the weather turned out to be pleasant, and apparently I went on a day when strippers were let in for free.

But then I realized as I sat there, these were not strippers, they were just your average college girls. I nearly had about 20 heart attacks – not in a “Wow, she’s hot” kind of way, but in a “Oh my God, I have a 16-year-old daughter” kind of way.

As much as I was amazed by Knowshon Moreno hurdling the poor Central Michigan player (that guy’s gonna catch hell in the film room next week), I was more amazed by what these girls were wearing, or rather, not wearing. Let me tell you this about the little dresses the college girls wear today to football games: the hemlines are getting higher, the necklines are getting lower, and my blood pressure was skyrocketing.

There was a time when I’d see these girls and I’d elbow the guy beside me in order to say, “Hey, buddy, check it out.” Now I have to refrain myself from saying, “Young lady, does your father know you left the house dressed like that?”

It’s unbelievable. One girl tapped me on the shoulder and I didn’t know if she wanted me to let her get past or give her a dollar. I saw a Dave Chappelle comedy special where he said that women who dress like whores aren’t necessarily whores, but they “are wearing a whore’s uniform.”

Is it like this on campus during regular school days now? If so, how can any young man be expected to pay attention in statistics class? Then again, after a childhood of watching MTV and having access to the Internet, they’re probably immune to it by now. It’s like a paramedic when they see an accident victim. Ho-hum, here’s another one.

It was much different when I was in school there. I went to college in the conservative, Reagan-era mid-80s, when the girls all dressed like Anita Bryant was their mother. The girls mostly wore blue jeans, but they didn’t hang down to their cracks to show off their tattoos, which is just as well, cause none of the girls had tattoos, either.

I hate to sound like an old fart, but seriously, girls, I think you’ve taken this a bit too far. I don’t think it will kill you to dress a touch more conservatively. If I want to see a bunch of boobs at a college football game, I’ll go to Knoxville.

(Pausing while all the Tennesee fans get that one).

Perhaps it will come back around eventually. I’m not saying the young ladies should go out dressed in petticoats and turtlenecks, but would a little modesty be a bad thing? I’d like for things to return to like they were in the old days, when the only thing that threatened to give me a heart attack at a Georgia football game was Jim Donnan’s play-calling.

Fire in the belly

When I was a young man back at the University of Georgia, my favorite professor was Conrad Fink, who I’m pretty sure is still there.

Fink is a brilliant man with great bushy, expressive eyebrows, and he was a no-nonsense journalism teacher. He taught us that we should always write our stories in a way that the “Kansas City milkman” would understand what we were writing about.

He also told a great a story about when he was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Borneo, covering a war, and he leaped over a barricade and rushed up to the king to ask him a question, since the press was tightly controlled there. According to Fink, the king, a large man, patted him on the head and just said, “Everything will be ok, little man.”

I had a little trouble staying awake in Fink’s class, not because he was a bad teacher, but because it was a 7:50 a.m. class, and I was a senior in college, and I played drums in a band, so I had a few late nights here and there. He would throw erasers at me when I nodded off, then when I woke up, he’d continue as if nothing had happened.

I got to thinking about Fink the other day, because I remembered one day my senior year, when I met with him in his office and asked him about my impending journalism career. I was expecting great advice from him, a pep talk to send me rushing out the door and ready to take on the world.

He sat back in his office chair, folded his hands in front of his chest, pointed those steely eyes at me and said, “Williams, you have a lot of talent. Probably more than anybody else in the class. But you don’t have that fire in the belly that it takes to be a great journalist. What you need to do is go down to someplace like Coca-Cola and get yourself a job writing advertising copy. That’s your best bet.”

I was stunned. How dare he say this to me? Well, I would show him. I would go out and get a job at a newspaper and work my way up to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and make my mark, no pun intended.

Of course, he was right. Ten years later I indeed found myself at Coca-Cola, writing promotional copy for the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay. This after a journalism career that featured such highlights as the time an editor brought us all together to give us a lecture on not throwing our pencils away while they were still usable, because that was a waste of money. He also showed us how to write on both sides of the paper in our notepads. Whatever flicker I had in my belly was stomped out at that moment.

For the past 12 years, then, I’ve followed Fink’s advice, not exactly writing advertising copy, but mostly corporate stuff. I suppose I’m a little disappointed in myself for not becoming the next Bob Woodward, or even Mike Royko, but I’ll live. Like Judge Smails said, “Well, the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” Or even corporate hacks.

Eastbound and down

I was watching the TV news last night, and while I heard a lot about that 17-year-old girl in Alaska having a baby (a new low-point for broadcast media), I didn’t see anything about Jerry Reed dying, and that’s a travesty.

My dad took me to see “Smokey and the Bandit” at the old Parkwood Cinema in Griffin, one of only two movies I ever saw with him. (The other was the Disney movie “The Aristocats” at the Imperial Theatre, which isn’t there any more. Funny how you remember stuff like that.)

I don’t know that I’d put "Smokey and the Bandit" in the pantheon of great cinematic achievements, but as a 13-year-old boy, I thought it was pretty funny. So did my dad. I don’t ever recall seeing him laugh as hard as he did watching that movie. He even laughed at the naughty parts, which gave me license to laugh at them, too, and made me feel a little more grown up.

Jerry played Cledus Snow in that movie, and he did a few other movies, but he was mostly known as a musician. Though he certainly wasn’t in the same league as Waylon and Willie and Merle Haggard, etc., he was a pretty innovative guitar player, and wrote some good songs, and he played and sang on Willie Nelson sings Kris Kristofferson, which is one of the best country records ever made. Oh, and he once stood up to Elvis Presley.

I recently read Peter Guralnick’s excellent Elvis biography Careless Love, and he relates the story of when Elvis wanted to record Jerry Reed’s song Guitar Man. They couldn’t get the guitar part done right, though, so they had to get Jerry himself to come in and play it.

They recorded the song, and then they let Jerry know the deal – in order for Elvis to release his song, he was going to have to sign over a good part of the publishing rights, and therefore the royalty money. Jerry looked at Elvis’ representatives and sort of politely told them to kiss his butt.

“I'll put it to you this way,” he reportedly said. “You don't need the money and Elvis don't need the money, and I'm making more money than I can spend right now - so why don't we just forget we ever recorded this damn song?”

Eventually Elvis gave in and released the song without getting the publishing rights. It was probably a risky move by Jerry Reed to stand up to Elvis that way, but you have to admire him for it. Dolly Parton did the same thing when Elvis wanted to record I Will Always Love You, and that turned out to be a brilliant decision, because she made a lot of money off that song.

So goodbye to Jerry, an American original. Man, every day it seems like it’s somebody else.