Just Shoot Me

Today has been a very bad day. If you spent your Monday cleaning the melted chocolate from Rosie O'Donnell's fat rolls, I'll wager you still had a better day than me. For today, I spent eight excruciating hours at MPO training.

MPO training is the police equivalent of a prostate examination. It is our annual training and recertification, taught by fellow officers who make Al Gore and John Kerry look exuberant. On Friday, I spent eight hours "learning" about legal updates and identity crimes. The pertinent information could have been disseminated in an hour, yet the department stretched it to eight.

Today, I had an exciting eight hours of "Gangs." Allow me to paint you a (drab) picture. Our instructor seemed nice enough, but after the first hour, I noticed an unsettling trend: she mispronounced a lot of common words. "Certain" became cer-TAIN. "Weaponry" became "weaponTry." It was bizarre-EY; I mean, bizarre. Any hoo, the instructor read verbatim from the lesson plan in a brutal monotone for four hours, pausing only thrice to make her social commentary of the white supremacy gangs. (Suffice to say, she seemed to think a lot of white people - read: most - belonged to those groups.) Soon, most of us were contemplating pulling a Richard Jeni.

By the end of the day I retained only one little tidbit of interesting information: Serena Williams apparently showed the "Crips" gang sign in the sisters' Got Milk? ad.