PUT ME IN, COACH

Tuesday I attended the first of five days of "supervisor training" — a requirement for my job, even though I am a supervisor only in the most superficial sense. Unlike many "supervisors" at my workplace, I do the exact same work as the six people I supervise, with the addition of a few administrative tasks and some extra accountability. The title "supervisor" sounds plain silly.

But whatever. I'm certainly not averse to learning something new, so if the company wants to pay for such training, I'll go with an open mind — a bitter, sarcastic, mocking mind, to be sure, but open.

Although you will scarcely credit what follows, it is completely true, and, please bear in mind, this was only Day One.

Now I had heard a little about this training before I went — from other "supervisors" who were obliged to go. Not a lot of details — people were curiously mum, which makes me suspect that the last day is a brain-washing session — but broad hints about the nature of the program: squishy, New Agey, self-helpish, embarrassing.

I was not expecting the additional adjectives of rural, cutesy-Christian and trite — a deadly mix when combined with the former.

Fault my taste, if you will, but if you're going to have an Anne Geddes photo greeting people at the door — a baby sitting in a bowl of roses — you might as well hang up a sign that says "Check your IQ." Ditto with the onslaught of country figures — dolls, cutouts, signs, figurines — adorning every wall and surface, erupting from every nook and cranny, spouting bits of redneck wisdom. A little of this I don't mind. But the problem with this aesthetic is that there is never just a little. It's an aesthetic of excess. Its practitioners are not satisfied with a well-placed objet here and there; the point is to overwhelm you with an orgy of fake flowers and stuffed animals, pastel colors and faux-lace and cute sayings, to keep you moving through the room emitting a complimentary barrage of oohs and ahhs. It's all about vanity, really: Look at all of my feel-good stuff! — a vanity made explicit after I started noticing that our trainer's name was everywhere — on coffee mugs, on decoupage signs, on wall-hangings, on stylized drawings.

And it's about commercialized "femininity," the kind that makes my skin crawl, the kind that aesthetically reduces grown women to prepubescent girls. Honestly, I've always wondered how a man could bring himself to have sex with one of these wives whose beds are covered with stuffed animals wearing overalls, who exclusively inhabit a princess world of pink hues and Precious Moments. Wouldn't that be absolutely creepy?

The only decor in the building — a cool, brick churchlike meeting place from the 1920s — that attracted me were a few bookshelves on one wall. But when I examined the titles I found that they were row upon row of self-help books of the Chicken-Soup variety. There was even one called "Life Coaching for Dummies." Gads.

This collection of "literature" came into high focus when our trainer mentioned rather casually halfway through her presentation that she valued her mental health because it wasn't "always so good." A co-worker and I exchanged a glance, and I could tell he was as familiar with the type as I was: someone who had a rough patch in life, like we all do; only, instead of using a self-help book to get through it, she made her life into a religion of self-help. The means became the end. It's like sporting a bandage after the wound has healed. It's unseemly.

Maybe she has a true passion for helping others, but the fact that she refers constantly to the money-making aspect of her "coaching business" — she calls herself Chief Encouraging Officer — tends to taint whatever altruistic motives she may have. She also praised her "marketing mentor" several times for helping her achieve "business and spiritual success." And she referred unabashedly several times to her convertible sports car as something she really valued in life. It's OK, she told us, to prize material things because they are a symbol of our hard work and who we are.

I pondered that statement as I sat at a table laden with rainbow-framed mirrors and Beanie babies and a fly-swatter contraption that you are supposed to politely snap in someone's direction in lieu of telling them to shut up.

So that's the scene. And this is the substance: I have a Blue temperament. This means I am like Princess Diana. A co-worker had a Gold temperament, which means that he is like Colin Powell. Others had Green — Bill Gates. And others orange — Tony Danza. (Yes. Tony Danza). After our trainer had color-coded everyone in the room by administering a "personality assessment," she lectured about how the different colors work together — which ones complemented each other, which ones were opposites. She noted, for example, that problems could really arise if you got an "immature Blue" and an "immature Green" working on a task together. The point of this, I guess, is that as a supervisor you should be aware of what color your employees are and be sensitive to their weaknesses and strengths.

This color talk went on for hours. You can probably imagine me sitting there seething and rolling my eyes. But I didn't. I just went with the flow. I fell under the pretense that it was all valid and worthwhile; otherwise I would have exploded. I mentioned to my co-worker that if she kept going on about the colors it was going to seem REAL. And he observed that that is exactly how fundamentalist cults work: repetition of idiocy in an uncritical environment until the idiocy acquires substance.

She did at some point mention that this wasn't "strictly scientific," but you could tell she considered that a negligible flaw.

I have a good relationship with the people I "supervise," and I highly doubt that it will be improved by my labeling them Blue or Orange. In fact, I highly doubt that anything will be accomplished by my spending five days of my life under this woman's tutelage — except for her to advance another rung in the pyramid scheme of her self-help empire.

And, honestly, perhaps it's because I'm reading the book "Absurdistan," but I enjoy farce just enough to be OK with that.