Today’s Triumvirate of Idiocy

17 comments on “Today’s Triumvirate of Idiocy”

1. Bradley Robb says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 8:52 am

   I don’t know which is worse – Texas banning Brown Bear on “accident” or that SoCal county banning the dictionary on purpose and then looking for further proof.

   “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

   Really wish that was from the Onion.

2. rr says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 9:57 am

   I’m sure a lot of kids do look up swear words in the dictionary. Then again if this county is so conservative they probably don’t have sex ed classes for the kids to learn about oral sex. They might just have to learn about it the old fashioned way.

3. Lindsay says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 11:08 am

   I consider looking up naughty words a vital part of my 6th grade education. It was the only thing that made preparing for vocab tests even partially bearable.

4. Sarah says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 11:14 am

   What is unfortunate is your spelling of “unforetunately.”

5. Corey Redekop says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 11:21 am

   This just in: school bans biology textbooks for containing pictures of lady bits.

6. George says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 11:21 am

   Yeah, Sarah! Way to stick it to the guy who provides a free service! Somewhere, someone just fell in love with you. You rock the pedant-iverse!

   If you stick around, I’ll really wow you with some typos. Of course, with an attitude like that, I’m not asking that you do.

7. Steven W. Beattie says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 1:06 pm

   Bradley: The Brown Bear thing is just blatant idiocy. The banning of the dictionary is bizarre: how does one define “oral sex” WITHOUT being sexually explicit?

   Also, I’ve been chuckling for the last day or so over the image of Betti Cadmus sitting with a dictionary in some room somewhere, trying to think of dirty words and phrases just so that she can check to see if they’re included: “What about ‘teabagging?’ I wonder if that’s in there …”

8. August says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 2:21 pm

   English-only policies are actually dead common in the business world. Waterloo’s own Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry, for example, also ban their employees from speaking languages other than English while in the workplace.

9. Monica says:
   January 26th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

   I love that image, Steven.
   I don’t always click on the links that fine Ninja George supplies, but i did click on the link to the dictionary thing, hoping maybe to get some small amount of titillation over this “graphic” definition of oral sex. Jebus, i’ve had more sexually explicit conversations with my 85 yr old mother. If’n they want a MORE graphic definition, i’d be happy to supply one.
   “the woman falls to her knees, her long hair falling around her shoulders. As she takes his swollen manhood in her soft hand, she looks up into his eyes with an air of supplication…..” and so forth.

10. August says:
    January 26th, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    Monica, that’s a little too gender specific. Ladies need love too! Or maybe that’s anti-Republican?

11. Monica says:
    January 26th, 2010 at 5:43 pm

    that was only part one of my definition, August. I didn’t want George’s website to be censored.

12. Dave says:
    January 26th, 2010 at 10:58 pm

    Considering that Darwin’s book The Origin of the Species is banned in many different parts of the US, this really shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise.

13. Andrew S says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 10:21 am

    August, define “dead common.” My consulting work takes me to companies all across Canada. I have yet to visit one that has an English-only policy.

    Frankly, I’d say that RIM is cruising for a human rights complaint.

14. August says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 6:31 pm

    Dead common as in it’s been policy at most of the places I’ve worked, (including WalMart, Shell, and yes, RIM, which is how I know), and from conversations with friends who are *very* highly placed in HR departments at various corporations (I’d rather not say which), it’s pretty standard practice.

    RIM argues that it’s not only for safety/quality control reasons, but it’s also an anti-discriminatory policy. Speaking English is a prerequisite for working there, but speaking another language is not. Therefore employees who speak, say, Serbian (huge Serbian population on RIM’s factory floor in Waterloo) can deliberately exclude other employees, etc, and can also hide behaviours, like harassment, from supervisors who do not necessarily speak that language.

    (RIM also hires mostly temps, who they let go after so many months regardless of performance, and then bring in a new batch so they will never qualify for benefits/protections/etc under Ontario labour laws. Our on-site reps from the agency, who were supposed to be there to look out for our interests, used to take us into a room once a month while the ‘proper’ employees were having meetings, and would explain how we should just shut up and keep our heads down, because RIM can and would fire us for no better reason than not liking our tone of voice, and because we were still technically employed by the agency, we wouldn’t be eligible for EI–and the agency might take their time finding us a new placement, because we pissed off their biggest client.)

    I’d be curious if your consulting work takes you to mostly white collar companies, because if not, welcome to the world of blue collar work in Canada.

15. Monica says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 11:54 am

    I think that when you pop in and out of workplaces for consulting work, you can’t say that you really get a sense of what the policies of the place are. Especially not thos unwritten, unspoken ones that tell you ‘if you know what’s good for you, you’ll put up and shut up’. There will be no human rights complaint if you’re hiring underpaid part time workers who really are just glad to have a job.

16. Andrew S says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 12:34 pm

    August, I work with distributors, and specifically on warehouse systems. So thanks for the welcome, but I spend a good chunk of my time in the blue-collar world. The difference, it seems, is the size of the companies. Huge corporations with isolated HR departments concerned more with covering the company’s ass tend to have more abusive policies.

    I had your same temp/contractor experience when working for GM Defence, by the way. The agencies are all slime.

17. JC says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 8:19 pm

    RE: English language workplace

    I was filling in as head chef at a friend’s restaurant a few years ago. When he came back from surgery he checked the books – I’d cut his weekly losses (good restaurant, lousy management) by almost 75%.
    How? I didn’t let on that I spoke Spanish for a couple of days, then ranked the help out is Spanish, and explained that their “arrangements” with the route trucks and their comps to their friends. were all known.
    They had been discussing them right in front of my face, assuming that I, like the owner, didn’t speak the language.

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