How Rude!

Last week I was giving safety orientation to 6 of our new associates. At one point I realized one of them was reading a book during my presentation. Was it a book I'd given him to read, or at least related to safety? NO. It was a book on SQL (he's an IT person). I was NOT happy. This is my time to impart important safety information, and he's reading a book, so he's obviously really not paying attention.

The next day I was telling his coworker about this. He told me I needed to tell their boss. About this time my coworker entered the conversation and said "He did it to you too?". He'd done the same thing when she had been presenting her info. She said she wasn't really bothered by it, but she thought it was rude. I said it did bother me.

I spoke to the person's manager about it, relaying that it happened to at least two different people and that it was unacceptable. He said he had given the new associate the book in question, but during people's presentations was not the proper time to read it. He stated he would speak to the he new person about it. Later that afternoon the person came to me and asked if I was bothered by his reading during my session. I said that indeed I was. He apologized but said "I'm really good at multi-tasking". I didn't bother to tell him studies show that humans are actually not good at that (texting + driving = bad, among other examples).

I was dumbfounded that he really didn't see anything wrong, that it never occurred to him that people might find this offensive. DUH! On a related note, we once had a salesperson who texted nearly the entire time during her orientation (around 4 days). She was the only person having orientation then, so it was even more conspicuous than the person reading in this last group. People were not pleased with that either. We could tell she was not a good fit, and sure enough she left very shortly after hire date, to no one's great sadness.

P.S. Bonus points to anyone who had the image of Stephanie from "Full House" when you read the title. For those of you who don't remember or don't know, that was one of her catchphrases.