Rites of Spring/Boy Am I Weak

Even though they're predicting more snow here I'm finally starting to see the first signs of spring. I'm not talking about tree buds, or flowers slowly pushing their way through the soil. I'm not talking about longer, slightly warmer days. No, the two things that signal to me that spring is on the way are two things. I saw my first harley of the season the other day. It was at least 50 degrees out and there were two of them riding side by side through my neighborhood. Always a sign that riding weather is approaching is when even the harley guys (who are now mostly lawyers and doctors and older less cold tolerant folks) are out tooling around and enjoying the weather. It was nice to hear the "bup, bup, bup" of the harley signature sound. But even with all of that, it's not enough to declare "Spring is Here!" No, I need that perennial tradition, Girl Scout Cookie Delivery Day.

You order them in the dark of winter, when you're hibernating and drowsy and your resistance to a 10 year old's high pressure sales tactics can easily overwhelm your self control. Sure, you can rationalize it as helping out a worthy cause. That it teaches the girlscouts about how to plan and operate a sales campaign and helps them become responsible young ladies. Please. The young lady bangs on your door, and while you're scanning 2 feet above her head to see who has the temerity to disturb your watching of the current reruns of the "Wheel of Fortune" on the gameshow channel, she whips out the multifold 4 color list with pictures of all your favorites. She starts hyping the joys of the thin mint. There must be a huge markup on those because invariably they start out there and then move on up. The tag-alongs, the do-si-dos, the traditional butter cookie. But the big momma of them all is the samoas. Now, like all heavily marketed products, I have no idea where they come up with these names. Some dark room buried deep in the bowels of the National Girl Scout Headquarters. All I know is that every year, they say samoa and I drool in pavlovian anticipation. I don't even like coconut. I don't even eat sugar. But there's something about it that makes me order 2 boxes of those and a box of do-si-dos every year. Then they go away and you forget that you even answered the door.
Some months later when you're contemplating that new spring workout plan. Convincing yourself that this year you're going to lose that extra 10 pounds that you packed on during the winter. That you're going to get active and get back hiking and riding your bike and really do it this year. That's when they strike. The sun is shining, it's 2 days away from payday and you have 10 whole dollars to last you and that knock comes at the door. A 10 year old repo chick wants some money. And they're waving cookies in front of your nose. hmmm. And they want their money now. So you fork over your money and grabbing them briskly from their hand you retreat into the privacy of your own home and embark on the yearly bout of fighting for enough self-control to not eat the entire box in one sitting. Even with the whole pot of coffee that it takes to cut the sugar coating in your mouth you start to vibrate. Clean the house. Go for a run and then drop and pass out in a sugar coma. That, my friends, is truly the very first sign of spring.

Angry Old White Guy

The company I work for has embarked on a company wide mandatory diversity training initiative. The company line is that they are being proactive, not reactive in this quest for all of us in the company employ to open our eyes to the ways that we may overcome the built in assumptions that we operate under. To provide us with the means to overcome those filters to better communicate and facilitate working with people of different cultures and backgrounds. A lofty goal for an entire workforce. In this initiative they are trying to get us to understand that the core values that you operate your everyday life under may not play out with the person you are interacting with in the work place. And we played games to show how the different groups that we have at work view and look at things. Very enlightening. Mind opening. And one of the games we played was to be split into three groups. White women were first. People of color were second. And White men were third. These are the groups that they broke us down into. I think to show how even in the groupings that we normally assign to people to make them easier to understand and deal with there is major diversity. I of course was in the third group. And I knew better. I opened my mouth about something that has been eating at me for years. I took the course of brutal honesty and told a story of how I had come to the company as a temp. How in the first 10 months of working there I had work 2080 hours. For those of you who don't know, that's one year of 40 hour work weeks in 10 months. And at the end of that time, the company hired me full time. And at that point, two of my peers made the statement (overheard by me, not to my face) that of course they would hire me, I was a white guy, part of the good ol' boy network. So one full year of hard, personal life neglecting work was pissed out the window. I didn't do anything to deserve the job. I was just a white guy that the bosses liked. I knew when I opened my mouth to tell that story that I should just stay quiet. I knew it. But I wanted to see how much this intensive day of training had actually worked it's magic on my fellow employees. And I was tragically correct in my assumption that nothing had changed. I had made an error. I was now the angry white guy. The one who hated affirmative action. The one who had expressed an experience contrary to what "everybody" knew was a lie. I was white. I had all the advantages that that infers on one. It was still a heartbreak to me that the people I was with were embarrassed for me. And then someone spoke up and told me that no matter what I thought, I was privileged. Whether I knew it or not, that that's how I got the job. That at our level everyone had the same skill set, it was something else that I brought to the table that got me hired. And that it was because of my race and my gender. So, I think, diversity of opinion and experience are only for the "others." Because no one wants to think that angry old white guys have had to experience the exact same thing as they have. Because everyone knows that if you're white and male, it's handed to you. All you have to do is show up.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother to care.