Yesterday, when I was recalling a mostly-repressed memory of a training session gone wrong, I believed that I was the only one left in the organization who’d attended the session. I was wrong. I found one other survivor clinging to the life-raft of sanity.

Our memories of the session don’t quite add up. He insists that we weren’t actually instructed to puff up our to-do lists by writing down and crossing off bodily functions. It was all about rewording everyday interactions to give yourself “forward momentum.” Thus,
you were supposed to notate something like “grunt hello at supervisor before going face-down in coffee” as “interface with superior and debrief for day ahead.”

It was still an incredibly stupid, and expensive, waste of time.

I started making a list of the things I need to do this weekend and it was getting ugly and overwhelming, especially when I factored in how much time I committed to being in the recording studio Saturday and Sunday.

There was only one thing to do: start cheating and putting down items I could immediately cross off, thus feeling an immediate sense of accomplishment. Things like “shower,” “get dressed,” “mumble to self” and “drink coffee.”

Some call it pathetic. I call it optimizing my daily performance-intensity goals. I learned all about optimizing my daily performance-intensity goals at a training session once about 7 years ago. It hurt really, really bad. There was a lot of role-playing. In fact, now that I think about it, I am the only one left working here out of all the people who were sent off to that session of managerial-training masturbation.

At least the session was at a Top Secret Location in DuPont Circle so there was an excellent selection of bars for us to choose from once we were sprung from Hell. That may be why the only thing I remember from the entire session was “optimizing my daily
performance-intensity goals.” I think the perky trainer got paid gobs o’ cash to teach us that.

Want to know how you optimize your daily performance-intensity goals? Essentially, you take your Franklin Planner and make a detailed list of what you have to do today. You go into absolute ant-fucking detail about everything, even the softball stuff like
“drive to work” or “pee.” Then you cross off the stuff that you listed even though you already did it, and presto! You look like you’re a high performing machine.

The key is to never let anyone get close enough to the Planner to see that what looks like an important project is actually a notation reminding you to “inhale and exhale ryhthmically.”

Yes, my employer made me sit through an 8 hour session to learn to do that. Fortunately, I don’t have a Franklin Planner. That would be a waste of money, because if I did have a Franklin Planner, I would have set fire to it by now.

Last night, Husband and I were having one of those conversations about the stupid toys we had in our childhoods – the ones that are now banned because they were dangerous. This started because we saw an ad for that pre-school game “Hi-Ho Cherry-O.” I had no idea that game was still around. Those little cherries are the perfect size for a toddler to swallow; and they are probably more enticing than other similarly sized game-pieces because they are actually shaped like a food object.

Frankly, I was kind of excited that there were still dangerous toys around. Not because I wish ill on children, but well, just because. It’s not fun unless it’s dangerous, right? Okay, maybe not. Maybe I should just drop this line of thinking and move on to a rough reconstruction of the Lawn Darts conversation.

I said, “It was a stupid concept from the get-go.”

He replied, “What do you mean, it’s like darts or horseshoes. You throw the darts into the target, it’s just on the ground.”

I answered, “Yes, but the whole concept it flawed. Who thought it was a good idea to throw steel projectiles at one another.”

He stared at me and said, “What?”

I then described the game as I understood it, that you set up the hoops like 10 or 20 yards apart and threw the darts at your hoop while standing by your opponents hoop.

He replied in carefully measured words, “No. You stand behind the person throwing the darts.”

Okay, that does make sense. I have no idea what I was thinking. Maybe my cousins didn’t play the game while facing one another. Maybe I just have vague memories of it being played that way because of the alarmist tone of news stories when the game was banned. If someone tells you that you saw or did something enough times, you can start to believe it.

Or maybe my memory is correct, because we are after all talking about my cousins. Maybe they were just playing by some alternate form of rules. You know how in Monopoly there are
alternate rules for shorter games? Perhaps they were using the Lawn Darts Natural Selection Rules? Who can know.