Job was an education in insensitivity training

On Thursday night's episode of "The Office," Michael the boss puts employee Jim in an uncomfortable situation by making inappropriate remarks during lunch at Hooters. Michael later tried to have the lunch reimbursed as a business expense.

The beauty of "The Office," an NBC "documentary" comedy, is its knack for being funny and cringe-inducing at the same time, due almost entirely to the delusions of Michael, the boss who believes he is a beloved manager at the Dunder Mifflin paper supply company, when he's really a socially incompetent jerk.

And the program is both funnier and more painful when you've been there.

My first full-time writing job out of college was at a Colorado company that published trade magazines for the sign, glass art and T-shirt screen printing industries. The company possessed its own Michael, in the form of the company owner, and its own Dwight, who on "The Office" is the entirely dislikable sidekick.

The owner was a man with slicked-back hair and a big ego. He tried too hard to relate to his staff, mostly recent college graduates as the pay was, to phrase it nicely, "entry level."

Admittedly, we weren't ideal employees. "The Office" plots are usually built around time-wasting activities - sensitivity-training sessions, diversity days and motivational booze cruises.

The lack of productivity at Dunder Mifflin may seem exaggerated, but at my old publishing company, the editorial staff and a few ad sales people would gather in the office of one editor for daily out-loud readings of Stephen King's "The Stand." And it's a long book.

I was only there for about a year. The job involved attending industry trade shows, standing in the aisle and pushing copies of the magazine on anyone who walked by. I hadn't signed on for this sort of work and displayed no enthusiasm for it.

So I left when I heard through the grapevine that the company owner was complaining because I wasn't "bubbly" enough on the job, because there's nothing so necessary as forced cheer when interviewing the movers and shakers of the screen-printing world.

I still have a few friends I met at that job. I also have a few embarrassing "Office"-like memories:

During one trade-show trip, the editorial staff was unadvisedly given control of a business credit card one night at an expensive restaurant that revolved on top of a Dallas hotel; we were consigned to Pizza Hut the next night.

Fair enough, but the company owner joined us for dinner, which was more punishment than was deserved. One would have thought he had never eaten in a Pizza Hut before, as he asked endless questions about the menu, and made patronizing comments to the waitress all the while using sexist and inappropriate terms of endearment with her. A car crashing through the restaurant windows would have been welcome.

His sidekick, the ad sales manager, provided some of us with quite possibly the biggest moment of humiliation-by-association of our lives. We were roving through a Safeway in downtown St. Louis one morning, during another trade-show junket. Most of the people in the store were African American. The sales manager walked through the store making loud comments about how some of his best friends were black, and then proceeded to list the most famous black celebrities of the day.

There's nothing like kicking off the day in the company of a loud, insensitive racist idiot - but not to discourage people from watching a similar idiot on "The Office" every Thursday night.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com