I never thought that I’d need to tell someone before they address customers for the first time at a new job “Hey, try not to drop the f-bomb.” Apparently I should have been a little more explicit and told my trainee not to be so, well, explicit.

In fairness, I should have known better than to let a trainee lead a class on his first site, but he said he was ready.

The trainee, not so affectionately known as Eggs (a play on his last name) was a large man from the upper peninsula who looked like he walked right out of the Hiawatha National Forest and into a newsroom.

He wore a plaid shirt (as close as you can get to flannel without it actually being something Paul Bunyan would have worn) tucked in to the elastic waistband of his black dress pants. He completed the outfit with white sneakers and gym socks. Journalists and IT guys are notoriously poor dressers, so he fit right in amongst the newsroom- and systems-types.

Eggs was a memorable character, often more cartoon than human. He brought a snake to his job interview to use during the demonstration portion (we all had to show that we knew how to teach, Eggs taught us how to feed his snake.) Another time he got so blotto during an after work game of flip cup (such things were the norm back then) that he spent the night sleeping it off under his desk. He was a former reporter and college rugby player. When I picked him up to leave for the site he had three suitcases and an oscillating fan.

So there we are, the lumberjack and I, standing in front of a very skeptical audience of disgruntled journalists from the stabbiest town in Ohio, trying to convince them that the new way of doing things is better. In case you’re wondering, for these folks, even if the new way actually is better, IT’S NEVER BETTER, but I digress.

At this point we’d been through a few of these classes and Eggs was itching to get his feet wet. When he asked if he could teach the next class I told him sure, as long as he was prepared. This meant making sure he had an outline and some sample stories to demonstrate how the system worked for the users. Usually I just grab a story from the AP as an example to show the users how to spell check, etc. Eggs said he had a file to use, so I turned the class over to him. Because the class was large, he had his desktop projected up on a very large screen.

Eggs was cruising through, not doing a bad job for his first time, when it came time to show the class how to use the spell check.

“So you go up here to the Edit menu and choose ‘Check Spelling,’” he said.

And as soon as he clicked on the spell check, highlighted in blue a few sentences in, was the f-bomb.

To his credit, Eggs was quick on his feet. “Oops. Let’s try again,” he said as he clicked on the button to skip that word and move on to the next. Sadly, it only got worse from there, as the next word was a word even more vile. If you’re wondering, it started with a C.

Still don’t get it? I’ll tell you when I SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY.

So there I was, standing off to the side of the room watching this train wreck, not knowing what word would come up next if he tried to continue to use the spell check. There’s no way it could have gotten worse, right? Honestly, I was afraid of the answer to that question.

So I started to address the class, making as big a spectacle of myself as possible. I was moving around, talking very loudly and gesturing wildly with my hands. I was doing anything to distract them from the Andrew Dice Clay routine of a sample story that Eggs had put up on the projector.

As I spoke, he worked the file down to a place that had a words that wouldn’t turn your grandmother to stone and I turned the class back over to him. Everything else was fine from there on out, but you’d better believe I let him have it once the users had left the room.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“I’m really sorry,” he replied. “That was some of my fiction, I guess I didn’t realize it had that kind of language in it.”

“Are you kidding me?” I shouted. “How is it that you wrote something, but didn’t know that it had swear words in it?”

He didn’t have an answer and shockingly, for a completely different reason, he didn’t last much longer at our company after that.