First, I want to point out that one cannot listen to text; conversation or dialogue yes, but you can only read text.

Two-way radio training. Since the riots and our office was burned we are all about security. Part of this new initiative is radio training. Yesterday afternoon, my boss came to ask me to come to hand-held radio training. I told her that I had been to radio training last year and that I did not need to sit around for an hour and a half to learn how to hold a walkie talkie upright. “No, this is advanced radio training, you should go.”

On the way up the stairs back to my office, I encountered two colleagues: “I hope y’all brought your crack ‘cause this is going to be the most boring shit you have ever encountered”, I warned.

The training was held in one of the burned out containers that used to house part of the finance department. Hot is not the word, the temperature was at least 98 farenheit, and without air conditioning the container was like a toaster oven. I sat down and our Afghan IT guy launched into his presentation.

The first power point slide was entitled, “What is Communication?”. I just shook my head. This was the same drawn-out remedial bullshit I had to sit through last year. I felt like standing up and saying, “What is communication? I am so happy we are addressing this question. Here I have completed graduate school and worked professionally for five years and I had no idea what the fuck communication was!”, but I restrained myself. It got worse.

While the swarm of flies in the room settled on my face, toes and hands and sweat beaded up, the IT guy took ten minutes to talk about all of the different types of communication and specifically, the types of communication we use in our offices (CODAN, VHF radios, e-mail, cellular phones, smoke signals, carrier pigeons). My boss told him to cut to the chase, and was backed-up by the finance manager.

So we fast forwarded to the section about “How to Speak Over the Radio”. I swear to god, some of the bulleted points included, “do not shout” and “speak in short sentences”. Then, there were definitions of radio lingo that included, “hello: a greeting”, “out: the conversation is finished” and a stern lecture about not using phrases like “roger, over and out” because they are WRONG and anyone who says them will go to hell. Then we talked about the “wolume” (volume) control and were subjected to more slides sprinkled with misspellings and poor grammar.

Finally, my boss put her foot down: “What I need to know is not how to turn on the radio. I need to know if someone breaks into my house at night or if we have another situation like the riots, what do we do?!?” The IT guy sheepishly replied, “I only can give training on how to use the radio. Those systems are to be decided by the Security Specialist.” At that point, I got up and I walked out. Forty minutes of my life lost and two reports to submit. This is my life.