A touchy situation (Haasha 38.99)

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I walked into the seminar room two minutes before the safety training course was scheduled to start. This would hopefully be one of my last required safety training courses to make up for my failing the ship-wide safety exercise. To my surprise, I discovered that I wasn’t the only occupant of the room. Auggie and Captain Victor had followed through on their threat to Jarl after the sunburn incident, so he was present and ready to be bored.

“Misery loves company, as you humans say,” I stated cheerfully as I took the seat next to him.

“No kidding,” Jarl responded gloomily. “Did I hear things correctly that they actually have the eyeball monitors turned on?”

“Yep,” I replied with irritation clear in my voice. “I nearly failed my last safety training holovid because I took my eyes off the screen too many times. And to make things worse, I’m pretty sure Auggie is picking topics intentionally to be annoying.”

“Oh, really?” Jarl asked with concern.

“My last safety training was on basic landing pad safety,” I grumbled and Jarl flinched. As a fellow pilot, he felt my pain.

“I wonder what treat he has in store for us today,” he muttered as I rotated to sit sideways and leaned back to put my head against his massive leg. In the last seminar, I was able to lay down sideways across two chairs to watch the holovid. It seemed like the system only cared that my eyeballs were on the screen, not what posture I adopted.

“Would you mind?” I asked while I pointed at my belly. Might as well see if Jarl would provide a belly rub and make this more relaxing.

“Sure,” Jarl said absentmindedly as he reached down with his left hand to give me a nice, slow, deep scritching.

The instant his hand touched my fur and started to scritch, an alarm went off. The very same nannybot alarm that went off when I let my eyeballs stray from the screen at the last training course.

“What the heck?” I blurted out. The holovid hadn’t even started! What possible infraction had we committed?

Crewmember… Haasha… and… Lord Jarl, your behavior is unacceptable. It is immediately clear why the Harassment Training Course has been selected for you both. This course will give you desperately needed instruction on how to appropriately act so that other crew are not offended and you do not touch each other inappropriately. Please sit up straight in your seats and refrain from unprofessional conduct for the duration of this seminar. Failure to do so will result in an automatic failure of the course. This is your first warning.

“Are you kidding me?” Jarl said flatly with a stunned expression on his face.

Lord Jarl, your public display of affection towards crewmember… Haasha… is unprofessional, as was her request for such affection. Please keep your hands to yourself at all times and conduct yourself with professionalism.

“I’m going to kill Auggie,” he then muttered quietly under his breath as he took his hand off my belly and I turned to face the main screen. 

“I’ll assist with that mission,” I said quietly.

Jarl simply crossed his arms and stared intently at the screen. Then something occurred to me.

“Lord Jarl?” I asked my safety training companion. “Why is the system calling you that instead of just Jarl?”

“Oh, that,” Jarl said with a smirk. “The training systems have the optional section for a title when you sign in, and they’re required to use that title. The system isn’t set up to check if the title is accurate or valid, so as long as it’s among the acceptable options you can use it. It’ll balk at something like king or empress, but you could do Lady Haasha or Madame Haasha if you want.”

“Too boring,” I responded with a grin. “Next time I’ll go with High Priestess Haasha.”

Thank you for your compliance. We will now begin the Harassment Training Course.

Given the title, I expected that this would be a training module on how to respect other species and their cultures. After all, acceptance and understanding of how other sapients view the universe can be one of the most significant challenges to working together successfully. 

No. It wasn’t that at all.

This was entirely a course on human interpersonal relations, and how to act “appropriately” in a “professional” environment. 

There was a part of me that was a little disturbed that the topic needed to be addressed. It spoke to a side of humanity I hadn’t seen, one where individuals might not be nearly as nice and reasonable as my crew. On the other hand, the training was so incredibly stupid as to insult our intelligence.

Don’t compliment a person by telling them they look good today. Why? Because that could be taken as “suggestive” or judging a person on their looks rather than the quality of their work.

According to this idiocy, a human saying I look pretty in pink would possibly be committing harassment rather than just joking around because I have pink fur. And if you believed the training, I wasn’t to be trusted in my judgement or my ability to speak up and let someone know if I found a comment offensive. 

Sarcasm? That’s unprofessional and easily misconstrued as harassment. 

Overall, the wisdom of this training module was that one should always be bland, boring, and unbelievably positive.

And never touch anyone. Even with a friendly hug because a hug could be received as sexually suggestive or appear to someone else as inappropriate. To be professional, you should understand that there isn’t “good touch” or “bad touch” based on the situation or person. Except for handshakes and other strictly formal acts, the best policy is "no-touch".

“No touching, eh?” I mumbled under my breath. 

I did what any reasonable adult would do in this situation. I reached out with my right arm and poked Jarl in the stomach. 

A moment later, I giggled and squirmed as Jarl’s hand briefly scritched the base of my tail where everybody knew I was ticklish. I quickly responded by giving him a quick slap on the ass as he deserved a spanking for being naughty. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jarl smirking and his left arm rising with index finger pointed in my direction for a firm jab. I quickly slid my butt over in the seat to make it likely his attack would miss. 

Before he could strike, the nannybot alarm went off.

Crewmember… Haasha… and… Lord Jarl. The topic of harassment and unwanted touching is not a joke. Again, it is clear why this module was recommended for your review. Discontinue your inappropriate behavior immediately and refrain from unprofessional conduct for the remainder of the training course. This is your second warning. Should a third instance occur, you will automatically fail the course and be remanded for remedial training on this topic.

Both Jarl and I stared daggers at the optical sensor in the ceiling.

To ensure compliance and appropriate behavior, crewmember… Haasha… please move to a new seat away from… Lord Jarl.

“Why me?” I cried out in frustration.

Processing. 

“Well, that was unexpected,” Jarl commented.

Crewmember… Haasha. Your point is valid. Selecting only you to move could be seen as unfair treatment or harassment based on your gender. Crewmember… Haasha… and… Lord Jarl, both of you please move to seats away from each other and in different sections of the room to prevent any further incidents. Failure to comply will result in automatic failure of this training module.

“Nice try,” Jarl said with a sad sigh as he got up and moved towards the back of the room.

I simply shook my head and moved to a seat near the front. I chose a seat where I knew Jarl should have a clear view of my backside and considered what I could do with my tail to distract him. 

I then thought better of it. As fun as it might be to get Jarl a third strike and have him suffer through remedial training, there are things you should never do to a friend. My frustration was really with the training module and nannybot, not him. I decided my best option would be to just grind my teeth, stare at the screen, and get through the training. Even if the training was beyond idiotic, insulting, and a waste of time.

Twenty mind-numbing minutes later, we had a 15-minute break. Sadly, there would be another 45 minutes to watch. I got up, stretched, and headed back to chat with Jarl. I had a feeling we both needed to vent a little bit, and I was not wrong.

“Sitting through training courses like this makes me want to twerk a loader in front of our cargo team,” Jarl said with exasperation.

“Oh? What’s twerking?” I asked. The closest word I could think of was tweaking, and that didn’t make sense.

Jarl giggled at my confusion.

“Twerking is a specific sort of bending down swinging your hips,” he said cryptically. “A bit of a rude dance move.”

“What, like this?” I asked as I imagined a good dance beat in my head. I then started to shimmy down and swing my hips, thrusting them out to lead as I danced to the right. If someone had been next to me, I would have bumped them out of the way with my hip.

Jarl laughed heartily as I strutted my stuff.

“Not exactly,” he responded. “It’s more suggestive. Allow me to demonstrate.”

He then bent down slightly and thrust forward with his hips repeatedly, making sure his butt stuck out noticeably before each thrust.

“Why would that…” I wondered as the move looked a bit exaggerated and silly but not problematic.

“Depending on your viewpoint, it's either an invitation to have people stare inappropriately at your ass or it's about Insert Tab A into Slot B, repeat until finished,” he said with a devilish grin.

‘Oh… That’s right!’ I thought as understanding dawned on me. ‘Human biology is a little different from Py’rapt’ch.’

“You know, it might be fun to learn some suggestive human dance moves. Give everybody a good laugh the next time we have a dance floor,” I said with a smirk and then decided to use some of the new vocabulary from the training course. “How about a little quid pro quo."

Jarl eyed me suspiciously.

"First, you teach me to twerk properly as well as any other suggestive moves it would be funny for me to learn," I said while looking up at him with a huge grin.

"Sure. I can do that," he replied and his grin grew as large as mine. "That's the quid; what's the pro quo?"

"I’ll…” I began before I was cut off.

The nannybot alarm started blaring. We failed the Harassment Training Course and were automatically assigned remedial training.