So my office is adopting a new software system. It requires 72+ hours of training. I'm not kidding. Trust me, we are all dreading this. It has been the hot topic here for some time now. There are various inside jokes and puns floating around about how awful it will be, some of which I don't get because 1.) I'm not 50 years old and 2.) I've only been here for 7 months. You can only imagine how fun this is for me pretending to laugh when I have no idea what is going on. Half the time I'm not even sure if things are funny, but I laugh anyways. I like to be polite.
So anyways. One dude keeps drawing similarities between this awful, dreadful training and marriage. And of course the first person he has to tell these fucking jokes to is me because Hai! I'm the newlywed. Still naive and fresh and young and drunk with love. And it's fun for him to poke fun at that. He grabs this chart that displays something called "The Valley of Regret" or whatever. According to this graph, the valley occurs within the first 9-12 months of business transition or something... I don't know exactly because I wasn't really listening. So there he is standing right in my face with this chart and says, "still married, right?"
"What? Um, yea. I'm two months in."
"Check out this Valley of Regret here." He is pointing to a grayed-out piece of the chart with "VALLEY OF REGRET" written on it in big, bold letters.
"Wow. That's pretty intense." I swivel my chair back to the attention of my monitors and keep my eyes on the spreadsheet in front of me.
He's so pleased with himself right now and I can see how excited he is to keep this joke going. "A lot like being married huh?"
I want to keep my job so I laugh. And finally the longest 30 seconds of my life is over.
He goes back to his cube, just across from mine, and shouts back at me, "Seventy-two hours of training! Whew! How long did it take for you to get trained before you got married?"
Asshole.
