PS: Mr. Blanc, there's a LOT to be said for working on your own, away from any corporate environment. I've worked for places with as many as > 100,000 employees and about 10 other sizes down to 4 and then just me. Smaller is almost always better, if pay and job security are not your be-all-to-end-alls.

I'm of the opinion that when it comes down to it, it's the lawyers and bureaucrats who are a big contributing factor in these still-rare workplace shoot-ups. They have made it hard or impossible for employers to make common sense decisions about firing people. The HR ladies just make things worse - they are like the modern elementary school principles at the playground.

PS One of the benefits of being a freelancer and working in the back bedroom is that the only threat of workplace violence is myself, and I’m rarely violent toward myself. I had enough time in the regular world of work, however, to understand how some guys—it is always guys, although not only white guys—finally just get fed up, snap, and shoot the place up. I’ve never been high enough up in the pecking order to be in the meals and entertainment brigade, but I did put in a couple of years as purchasing agent for a small construction company, and there were lunches or bottles of booze (no hookers or coke) from the vendors at Christmas time. This was forty years ago, and there was no idea that those gifts weren’t quite appropriate.

PS: Mr. Alarmist, I was never in the enviable position to be offered hookers and blow. (I would have passed on the blow and doubled up on the hookers.).

I think we did have some videos or "learning units" a few times that involved expenses and what the client or we were allowed to pay for, etc. However, that is not the world I'm in, so they cut that one out this time, but subbed in this idiotic workplace aggression stuff. I wish I could remember the exact term they used, but it's gone, yea!

No, I think the hot babes are perfectly OK, as long as men don't in any way get excited or interested in them. Them's the rules of the workplace.

I wonder if these compliance/aggression video producers hire the same casting company that supplies actors for the burglar alarm commercials. The latter are what I did a search on first to find a good image for the post, but then I found this nice "guy with the rifle who mistakenly came in on a Sunday" image.

PS:

This must have been produced by the same outfit that supplied online compliance training to my firm. All the bad guys were white ... no surprise there. The surprise was that they declared a poor older woman bookkeepers as an accomplice to the fraud even though the fact pattern said nothing about her involvement or awareness.

The funny part for me, which I flagged to the babe heading HR, was the page with three silhouettes, two of whom were male, and the third was a very shapely female in short skirt and spiked heels striking a surprisingly provocative pose. How did that get past.

The thing I had to flag to the head of compliance was a test case that I said was acceptable, but the trainers declared taking a gift of €25 was in violation of policy. I knew that to be BS because our Board had the original policy re-written to allow gifts to be commensurate with social station and environment, which worked to my advantage as well. As I pointed out to Compliance guy, €25 might be a meaningful amount for the back office clerical, but it is barely an appetiser for front-office types on a legitimate business lunch.

BTW, am I the only one in the world to notice the world economy has gone down the bowl since the compliance types started cracking down on M&E? Ah, I do miss the days of being offered hookers and blow. Now I guess I should be happy to be offered a sandwich.