Back in the early 90′s, there used to be an Australian comedy series called “Fast Forward”, that featured a character called, Calvin Cunnington (played by Michael Veitch), who would burst into laughter at any sexual innuendos mentioned in the workplace, subsequently driving his colleagues mad.
As a training video producer, specializing in safety and induction videos, as well as marketing videos in the industrial arena, I come across training materials that are pretty dry. My job is to transform the training materials into training video scripts that are interesting and will improve message retention and comprehension.
Yet weirdly, I feel a bit like Calvin when I read training materials and find all sorts of sexual terms lurking behind quite mundane and technical text.
My favourite one is slab penetration. Any shape and size of penetration can be made through decking. If size of penetration is greater than one rib…..
I couldn’t work out what it all meant and was very surprised to discover that slab penetration is all about cutting. Who knew that cutting a piece of metal is really all about penetrating and that even the size is so important?
The next one is “insert the fuel nozzle into the receptacle“. Okay, that’s probably harmless and the more I think about it, it would be pretty hard not to write that in a suggestive tone!
But time and time again, I come across very technical training materials that seem to use a lot of references to penetration, erections, vibrator compaction (ouch!) and receptacles. And many times, I’ve felt that the words are just said too many times or could be substituted for something else.
It reminds me of my biology notes at school. I found it quite funny to write orgasm, instead of organism in my personal biology notes. My mother read them and was quite disturbed that I had got those words so wrong. But that was just a teenager deliberately exchanging words for a bit of fun.
What I can’t work out is whether men are deliberately slipping in sexual terms because they are finding the material just a tad boring and they want to spice things up a bit. Or whether it’s all a bit subconscious.
One thing for sure is that while inserting sexual terms into training might be a bit of fun for the writer, it certainly doesn’t help the learner. Once I stumble on sexual innuendos in a very non-sexy topic, it is fairly distracting. Particularly, when I can’t understand how in the world cutting can be replaced by penetration. Or maybe it’s just me (or just a girl thing)? Maybe men are fine with all of these phallic phrases and don’t even notice them.
But as for staff training, how do employees go with reading these training materials? Are there Calvin-esque type sniggers occurring during induction training in workplaces across the country?
What I want to know is has anyone else experienced sexual terms being inserted into training materials (or even marketing materials) that just seemed a little bit inappropriate?
