Some end of school year advice.

What do you call those red little mouse knobby things on IBM laptops? I call them nipples. Or rather, I used to call them nipples, before someone got upset, and I had to spend three hours in sexual harassment training. Now, I call them "those red little mouse knobby things on IBM laptops."

When I worked at Merrill Lynch (during the "what the hell was I thinking" period of my career) I got sent to sexual harassment training a lot. I didn't mean to be intentionally inappropriate, or to cause any trouble, but I like to make jokes. And soon I learned that jokes, especially the funny ones, hurt the bottom line. So eventually, causing trouble became the joke, and I had a good time.

By the way - men tend to get sent to sexual harassment training a lot more frequently than girls do, so I really had to try extra hard. The first time that I showed up for one of those sessions, I was in a room with about 12 guys, and I made some comment like "well now I know who all the sexual deviants in this office are." Needless to say, that didn't go over too well. But they didn't have training for people who misbehave in sexual harassment training (although the redundancy of "sexual harassment training training" would be lost on most executives), so all I got was that "nobody thinks you are funny young lady" reprimand from the HR women.

Anyway, besides learning that any mention of human anatomy is inappropriate, I also gained some other valuable information about proper office behavior. For example, it's not Ok to wink at the CTO. It's also not Ok to quote Futurama, even if you do take extra care to explain that it's just a line from a comedy program and is not actually meant to reflect your views on relationships. ("The best way into a girl's bed is through her parents. Have sex with them, and you're in.") And any allusion to Drew Carey's "100 big dick jokes" routine is absolutely not Ok, regardless of how legitimate the context may seem (like if you are in a meeting with 100 mutual fund managers).

But that was Wall Street. I find that people here, at the University, are much more relaxed about these things. Or maybe they are just smarter, and can tell the difference between a joke and an intentional assault or an ignorant bias. Of course, it could be that Universities just don't have enough money for sexual harassment training. Either way, now I'm free to wink, and nobody minds at all.

However, those of you who have fallen off the high path of academia and have accepted real jobs in the corporate world should be prepared to deal with this sort of absurdity. So my advice to graduation seniors, and other irrational people who are about to leave campus life in search of more lucrative employment, is to really have some fun with this whole notion of political correctness. The hypocrisy of political correctness is especially ridiculous when it's enforced and advocated by the people who know nothing at all about corporate ethics. (Or, just ethics, for that matter). So, you are well advised to poke fun as much as possible. You probably won't change anything, but at least you'll entertain your friends, and you'll keep those HR people employed.

Oh, one more thing - don't drink the Kool-Aid.