Kulturkampf

[Nintex]

Ok, so session is finished and it was as boring and hollow as expected. Lots of wishy washy bullshit.

Anyway, the fun story was we were discussing definitions of words and this douchey facilitator shared an anecdote about his 15 year old nephew (this was the second anecdote about this nephew in the first 15 minutes).



So we're taking about the word "respect" and what it means.

Our group came up with the usual bullshit about being kind to each other etc. My contribution was the classic do into others... line of treat people how you want to be treated.

He disagreed and said that he was having a conversation with his nephew about the Barbie movie and his nephew said something that made him re-evaluate his outlook on respect. It's not about treating people how you would want to be treated, but rather treating people how THEY WANT to be treated.



You don't need to be a an undergrad philosophy major with a Good Will Hunting fetish to see the problem with that kind of thinking.

Couldn't help myself and had to speak up. Posed a question about Donald Trump wanting to be treated in a certain way and whether he would do that.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Closed the session off by saying "I got her number. How do you like them apples?"

Then everybody spontaneously cheered and carried me out of the conference room on their shoulders!

Here's my go to trolling strategy for these sort of things (and it always works).

Be the most interesting, participating and active member of the group for the first half. Act like you're helping the person running the session. Gaslight him/her so they think you are on their side. Everyone will start to pay attention to you as you seem to give the right answers. Then at some point do a complete 180 turn where you disagree with basically anything the trainer says or point out small inconsistencies in their lecture. Since you are now the co-host you can freely interrupt and your opinion is as valid as that of the person running the session. Perhaps you are even more of an expert in the eyes of your co-workers (after all they trust you more than some rando). 

At the end there's always the 'upsell' because they do these things to sell books/courses/personal training/newsletters or whatever. 
Politely say: "Thank you, but I think I speak for all of us that we don't feel like this is something we are interested in at this time. To be honest we were kind of dissapointed in the quality of the session we expected something more in depth on this subject." Everyone will nod in agreement because wow, you dared to speak up that this fucking sucked.

You just ruined their day and they'll never train anyone at your company again.