Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Catholics in Medieval times had to do penance for remission of sin every so often, lest they die in a state of sin and be denied heaven. The penance was usually some physically unpleasant thing like kneeling for hours in prayer or wearing a scratchy shirt all day. That was a nuisance for the penitent and helped nobody else, so the Church decided it’d be okay to pay money for forgiveness instead doing penance. The practice died out after a certain German priest threw a fit about it, but the precedent is there.
Minnesota lawyers must sit through two hours of penance every three years, lest they perpetuate Bias In The Legal Profession. It’s not physical but being harangued by harridans is still unpleasant. That’s a nuisance for busy people and helps nobody else. It’s time to resurrect the old system of selling indulgences – I’ll send them a check, they’ll pretend I’m cured of bias. Think of all the money we could raise, all the lawyers we could hire for poor people. And their children! Do it for the children.
Joe Doakes
They’ll have the children in those classes before too long.
We had to sit through HR presentations like that. But being engineers, wasting time grated on us, so we tended to harass the HR representatives and question them and their presentations.
HR responded by going to on-line classes.
Now we engineers have competitions to see who can get through them the fastest (Javascript plug-ins being the favorite method). Our poor managers, however, have to meet California legal requirements, meaning that they have a minimum set time to their courses and the web pages enforce that limit.
Elimination of Bias courses are generally pretty awful even by CLE standards. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve always managed to find free ones so I at least don’t have to spend money listening to the driven and with On Demand ones (IIRC we’re allowed up to 15 per reporting period), I can put them on in the background while doing real work.