Phantom Blogging....

When you read this, I'll be in the car on my way to podunk town PA to get my Mother. I took off Thursday and Friday to do this. She left when my Aunts and Uncle came to visit, and just assumed I'd come pick her up. Funny thing about parents, I think they feel you owe them something. I dunno. Regardless, I'll drive four hours there, and four hours back. I'm taking her car too because mine has almost 100,000 miles on it (it's a 2004, I have no idea how this happened) and I'm going alone. Hope no one steals me in the rest area!

So I have mentioned how I've been taking diversity training at work. I already got a certificate, and now I have to take the management series. It's four classes, blah blah. This last class we watched an interesting movie called Eye of the Storm. It was after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and a teacher did an experiment on her third grade class. She told them that kids with blue eyes were smarter than brown eyed kids. Made the brown eyed kids wear a special collar to show they had brown eyes. Said they didn't have manners, couldn't have seconds at lunch, had to sit in the back of the class. They were dirty. The blue eyed kids also couldn't talk to them.

After lunch time, there was a fight at recess. One of the brown eyed kids punched a blue eyed kid, because he called him "brown eyes". As if having brown eyes were a bad thing? It was because they were taught that it was. The blue eyed kids were made to feel superior. They even did better/worse on flash cards they had done good at the previous day depending on if they were in the brown or blue eyed group. They felt stupid because they were told they were. In the end it taught the kids a lesson about not disliking someone for the color of their eyes (or skin). You can tell it was made in the 1960's 1) because that teacher would be in jail in this day for "experimenting on my children!!!!! and actually teaching them gaaaaaaasp" and 2) one of the kids said "maybe you shouldn't call a black person a (N-word)". Whooops!

A lot of that class was eye opening, seeing first hand how men were given advantages over women in all these documentaries where they went for the same job, but the man was given an aptitude test, and the woman a typing test. Assuming she wanted to be a secretary over a manager without asking her. How an older woman in her 50's and a woman in her 20s went for the same waitressing job, and the older woman was told she was "too qualified" for the position. How an apartment was just shown to a white man, and within minutes, a black man was told it was rented. It's nice to live in a bubble and not think that these things are happening every day, but they are. And it kinda makes me sick.

They sure didn't hesitate taking back the money they gave me without asking in my checks at work this pay day. Also known as...I got a free 8 hours for the last 3 holidays. OUCH! I'm missing 149 out of my check. And, I've got two more pays to suffer.

P.S. Ever since training a coworker on Wed, and telling her knowledge is power. I have not been able to stop singing this freaking song!!!!!