Day 1: Effective Strategies in Conflict Resolution

I've had a number of jobs in my life, but so far have really avoided those hardcore officy type jobs. As such, the most I've really experienced in "employee training" is a few basic do's and don'ts, such as don't spill hot coffee on yourself or, hey, dumbass, dog bites hurt. EOF, however, sees it fit to train us as in things that basically boil down to common sense. Most of today was fairly unremarkable, with a few hours of pep talks in the morning, broken up by the appalingly bad on-campus dining (which, thanks to the fact that I'm living in a broom closet, is now mandatory in the absense of cooking.) The only highlightable part of the day was the Conflict Resolution seminar: a solid hour dedicated to a poor speaker and some of the most hilariously bad animal analogies I've heard in a while.

I don't expect everyone to share my interest in zoology, nor my penchant for reading articles about new behavior discovered in already studied creatures. But it still amazes me that in our world of digital information and new discovery, people still hold on to those tried and true (and fucking moronic) steriotypes that surround the animal kingdom. The speaker used a variety of animals to illustrate different "workplace personalities," which is valid enough I suppose, but unfortunately each one was dead fucking wrong when describing said animal's actual behavior.

Case 1: The Chimp
Steriotype: Almost everyone recognizes the chimp. The big lips, that funky, innocent face, the comically huge ears and long, furry limbs. Chimps are famously social creatures and depend on a rigid social structure to survive. They hunt together, they clean each other, and chimps are even known to communally raise their young. They even use a primitve language of grunts and bodily gestures to communicate, and are skilled craftsmen when it comes to simple tools. The chimps of the workplace are people who work together to accomplish a communal goal, and if said monkeymen are anything like real chimps, eat one another's children.

Reality: Yes, it is true that chimps are social animals, not unlike ourselves. But another lesser-known fact is that male chimps will occasionally snatch a baby chimp from it's caring mother's arms, and chow down. Chimps have also reportedly grabbed human babies from human mothers and, not seconds later, taken a big bite. And those motherfuckers have huge, scary teeth. And while chimps seem like the stoic philosophers of the animal kingdom, when enraged, they will first wail on their target with strikingly powerful arms, bite, scrach, and tear at hair, and then, when the beating is over, the group collectively pelts the target, whether it is alive or dead, with feces.

Conclusion: I don't know about you guys, but I'd rather have a co-worker who slacked off and wasn't so much a "team player," than one who will indiscriminately snack on my baby, beat me senseless and then finalize the humiliation with a thick coating of monkey dump.

Case 2: The Carp
Steriotype: Ah, the bottom-feeder. Carp is a bit of a misnomer: it is not one species of fish as it is a general description of many species. Goldfish and the Japanese Koi, for example, are part of the Carp family. These little guys represent the kind of worker who just does the bare minimum, who doesn't go out and hunt or accomplish anything, but instead feeds on alge, plants, and the remains left over from larger fish. A work force would benefit from these creatures vanishing from the workplace, and everyone just pulling their own goddamn weight, right? Nature would probably have an issue with that, since if bottom-feeders like carp were to vanish, it would lead to the collapse of the oceanic ecosystem as we know it.

Reality: Ever take a walk around a pond? See all that green crap growing on the surface? That is called alge. There are some places in the world where there is so much alge, that people must go and maintain the natural ponds, lest the invaiding goop strangle all of the life from the watery home of hundreds of creatures, and then become too large to sustain itself and die, leaving only a wet, lifeless hole in it's wake. Man, I sure wish there was something we could do about that... oh wait! Nature already has, with, you guessed it, bottom-feeders. All non-predatory sea creatures serve an important purpose in keeping the water clean, as fishy little janitors. They eat everything from harmful bacteria to rampantly growing alge, and even the remains of other creatures meals, which includes the excrement. This even happens on land, with bacteria and creatures such as dung beetles taking care of all the crap left behind by larger, more majestic creatures. So the next time you think of a dung beetle, think of them as six-armed sanitation workers, or if you like, tiny autonomous toilets.

Conclusion: There's that famous saying that a shark will die if it stops swimming. Well, sharks will also die if it didn't have those little sucker fish attached to the sides of its jaw getting a free meal from the predator's hard work. I think a world without bottom-feeders would be somewhat more tolerable than a world where sharks choke on the half-chewed remains of their hapless prey, and elephants wallow around balls-deep in their own piss.

Case 3: The Owl
Steriotype: The wise old owl, not unlike the swordmaster in a Kurasawa film. He sits on his perch, overlooking the forest with his large, yellow eyes, letting nothing escape his view. An owl co-worker is the type who seems to have worked there forever, dispensing bits of wit and wisdom to the new employees, never getting promoted or demoted, just staying still, and helping out. And by helping out, I of course mean killing without mercy.

Reality: Part of the reason Kurasawa's wise men were so popular with the youth was their sheer badassary. Remember in Star Wars when that walrus-looking bastard fucked with Obi-Wan Kenobi (patterned in character after the eldest warrior in Seven Samurai)? That's right, he got his fucking arm cut off with a whirring beam of light. And don't get me started on Egg Shen.

Owls are what Gene Simmons would call "100% Predator," and what actor Kurt Russel would identify as a "son-of-a-bitch." (Aside: two Big Trouble jokes in one article, ouch.) They aren't particularly evil, but are the shark of the bird world. Most birds would rather scavenge a meal than actively hunt for it, but not this mofo. He's out there, every night, hunting ground-based creatures smaller than he, and keep in mind owls can get fucking huge. They eat mice and snakes mostly, though sometimes they are reported to eat other birds. And unlike other predators which only eat certain parts, owls just down the whole damn thing at once, later regurgitating the undigested bits. The thing is so badass, even it's stomach won't take your crap.

Conclusion: Having a wise man around would be a benefit, but not a wise man who, if he deems you next meal, will silently descend from the sky, rend you apart with sharp talons, devour you whole, digest your person and then hock up your skeleton somewhere in the vast, lonely forest, never to be found again.

Case 4: The Raccoon
Steriotype: Raccoons are the silent background workers, keeping things together in the shadows, and the guy actually used the phrase "they tend to be loners." I mean, well, fuck it, lets just tear this one apart now.

Reality: Raccoons are adorable creatures. They are less creature and more critter. They have tiny hands and feet, bushy ringed tails and they even wear a widdle bandit mask. Awwwwww.

They also possess two of the most dangerous traits in nature: brains and visciousness. Raccoons are terribly smart and notorious as thieves, finding ways into the most inaccesable, convoluded locations and making off with your shit. They primarily eat by foraging for food, stealing things such as bird eggs, and when it comes to it, attacking and killing things with rows of razor-sharp teeth inside their cute little crittery faces. A raccoon will run before it will fight, but like most small creatures in nature, when cornered, this thing will cripple you. Raccoons are also one of the prime transmitters of the rabies virus.

As for them being loners, raccoons are social animals, operating as most mammals do in family-based communities. They even forage and hunt together, and while courting, mating, and raising children, both parents provide until the kids are old enough to leave the nest.

Conclusion: Having a raccoon for a co worker would be like having a cleptomaniac in the next cubicle. Every day more of your stuff goes missing: some granola bars one day, your stapler the next, up until your computer, social security card and your car are all missing. So you track them down one day and ask them, but they take off at lightning speed, but you manage to corner them in the bathroom, thinking that most theives are cowardly and apologetic when cornered. Instead, s/he bashes your face into the wall until the tiles break, claws the shit out of you and then jams your bleeding head into a toilet and flushes. Over, and over, again.

Case 5: The Snake
Steriotype: Snakes are almost always a negative image in American media, and this goes doubly for their workplace image. They are the sneaky, slimy backstabbers: the kind who hide from everyone else and strike without warning, poisoning their prey and then devouring their helpless bodies, while the target is still alive, whole. So lets break from talking about them in a natural sense, and in a more symbolic sense.

Reality: Sure, snakes are predators, but so are most beloved creatures. To the Native Americans, snakes were a symbol of wisdom and learning. The Egyptians worshipped them as gods, and the Hindu see them as powerful, intelligent creatures. Even an early America adopted the snake as a symbol with the popular Revolutionary War "Don't Tread on Me" banner. Snake venom is used in countless anti-venoms and even has medicinal value. But somewhere along the line, everyone decided to accept the biblical tradition of snakes being the bad guys, and they became a revilved creature in Anglo-Christian parts of the world.

But come on guys. If Eve really was in the garden of Eden, and God himself, and omnipotent and omniscient and all-powerful superbeing, tells her that she can't eat from this tree, and a freakin' talking snake comes and long and convinces her to do it, that isn't the snake's fault. Eve, like most people who take the Bible at face value, is just a dipshit.

Conclusion: I like snakes. They're like slightly more effective lizards, and for the most part, if you leave them alone, they leave you alone. What is the big fucking deal?

Case 6: The Peacock
Steriotype: The peacock is one species of the little men of the animal world. They aren't particularly strong or fast, and don't fly as well as smaller birds, but damn do they have some impressive feathers. In fact, the chance of a male to reproduce with a female (who is brown and has no giant crown-like tail) depends completely on the impressiveness of his tail. Males with shorter or less brilliantly colored tails are passed up when it comes to passing on their seeds, of course, not taking into consideration that the big tailed males may have a predisposition for disease, early death, or be just plain retarded.

Reality: Okay, so this analogy actually works, but are the peacock's traits not what we praise and strive for in human society? Every guy wants to have the biggest tail, and wear the most impressive colors to woo the ladies. Except instead of using a tail, which the fucking bird is born with so give the thing a break, human males use designer clothes, cologne, and wang-shaped cars to impress human females. And as the ever declining test scores of America's youth illustrate, this tactic works.

Conclusion: The peacock might be a showy asshole, but there are worse things in the world. Like ticks, which are the peacocks main source of food.

Case 7: The Shark
Steriotype: Often identified as nature's perfect predator, the shark is the kind of employee you don't want to be around: ever-moving, always hungry, and willing to eat anything. Sharks swim the seas, eating scores of helpless fish, and have little purpose beyond that and making more sharks. Truly a terrifying beastie.

Reality: Alright, here is what humans do not understand about nature: the difference between an organic system and a mechainical system. Mechanical systems do not allow for error, even if that error is beneficial for the overall process. Lets say you work in a food factory, and that your food, lets call it Space Meat, has a certain amount of barbicue sauce in it. One day the guy operating the sauce injector comes in with a wicked hangover and fills the Space Meat with too much, setting off an error in the weighing machine at Space Meat Quality Control. So the over-sauced meat is no good, but, the main complaint of Space Meat customers is that there isn't enough sauce, so the overflowing meat would have sold better than the standard Space Meat. However, that meat never saw the light of day because the mechanical system that creates it has no tolerance for any kind of variation.

Organic systems do not only tolerate variation, but thrive on it. A shark can eat the way it does because if the fish population drops, they can always breed faster. And if the shark population drops, the fish breed too much and pose more of a threat to the overall ecosystem than the sharks alone ever could. Because remember, if it were not for the fish, sharks would simply die out from starvation. All workplaces are trying to put organic animals in mechanical systems, which is why you end up with dumbass, uninformed analogies such as this one.

Conclusion: Well, that sort of was the conclusion.

Case 8: The Dolphin
Steriotype: Dolphins are the playful, social, almost human creatures of the sea, possessing many of the traits humans do. They mate for life, for example, and fish, play, and even have sex for fun. Dolphins also stay with their pods for life, traveling great distances as a team with an absolutely unbreakable bond. Who wouldn't want a workplace full of dolphins?

Reality: A workplace full of porpises, for one. Did I mention dolphins do stuff for fun? Know what else they do: kill. Can't take the good without the bad, you know? Dolphins have been observed in nature attacking and killing porpises with no other motivation than to show them whose boss. Dolphins also kill other dolphins, namely, baby dolphins, for no other reason than to show off. In the human world, we call those activities murder and infanticide, while for dolphins, it is all fine and dandy.

Conclusion: Working in a group of dolphins would be like working for the Mafia. Swim with the pack and you're fine, but deviate just a little, and trust me, they'll never find a body.

Case 9: The Eagle
Steriotype: The Eagle. The most majestic creature alive and the symbol of the American homeland. Who wouldn't be intimidated by this beast? The massive wings, the bladed, rigid beak, the almost glowing golden wings and the strong talons. The eagle has always been a symbol of strength and leadership, of one who is in charge and who is to be respected.

Right? ...right?

Reality: This is one of my favorites to pick apart. The eagle was never an American symbol until we decided to steal it from the Norse peoples, who viewed eagles as the reincarnated spirits of fallen kings. Eagles are not leaders in any sense of the word - they're birds, and the most interaction they have with other eagles is mating and making more eagles. And yes, while eagles do hunt snakes and fish, they are largely scavengers, and nothing more than the less ugly cousin of the vulture.

Conclusion: Eagles... leadership? Come on, the thing's brain is the size of an oddly developed peanut. You'd be better led by a parrot or a mockingbird.

So there you have it: nine widely accepted animals with human traits that are nothing of the sort.

In other news, Rotary Club is here with us and they are a bunch of obnoxious teenagers. And what the fuck is Rotary club anyway? Does it deal with rotors? Does it deal with rotating? What's the deal there?