There Will Be Blood

Staff training started on Wednesday and things went off without a hitch. A slight snag occurred Thursday when the Wilder staff scheduled a Blood Borne Pathogen training session and invited the Lanes staff to participate. Judging by the thickness of dust on our blood bucket, our previous training session was my senior year, so the new staff will be the only people on staff who have had this particular tutorial. I'm not sure how we fell through the cracks there, but luckily we haven't had any exposures --- that I'm aware of, anyway.

"Okay, since I give this talk several times a day and I don't want to get bored, we're going to play Jeopardy," the lady from Lorain County Health Department screeched at us. "Now we're going to split up into teams because you can't play Jeopardy by yourself." Apparently the show has been doing it wrong for the last 24 years. Way to go, Trebek. My clusterfuck alarm started to ring in my head and I maybe should have kept an eye on the lanes instead of taking in the tutorial.

Once our teams assembled, we were told that we have one minute to figure out how we are going to buzz in. Since it took everyone forty five seconds to process the WTF nature of the request, LoCo HelDe decided that in honor of county fair week each team would be assigned a barnyard sound. I took this moment to warm up the death glare. We were assigned wolves and would have to howl to buzz in. Death glare still calibrating.

What annoyed me most about this exercise was that there was no prep prior to playing. Jeopardy-like exercises are used to reinforce knowledge but don't work all that well in terms of presenting new concepts. It also doesn't help when Loco Helde is heckling people who give incorrect answers or, in my fellow teammate's case, an inability to remember what stupid sound effect he is supposed to make (or just say "howl").

When we finally suffered through all the questions, we had to do "Final Jeopardy", including writing down answers and whatnot. You know what I don't enjoy? People who hum the Final Jeopardy theme to imply that something is taking too long. Would Helde appreciate it if I started doing that the second she opened her mouth?

The torture ended at about 11:30 but I don't feel any more enriched than I did at 10:30. Of course, pathogen stuff is easy (from my tutorial my senior year...of HIGH SCHOOL): wash your hands, use gloves, double bag and throw out anything that comes in contact with major bodily fluids. See, I just saved you 59 minutes.