By 0830 Thursday morning, it was apparent our instructor had mixed up the days on his schedule. The stress workshop was supposed to start at 0800, but he did not arrive until 0840 and we started at 0900. The fellow who was sent to pick him up at his motel had to wait a while as the snow accumulated, along with the accidents (they passed three just getting across town).

The speaker was reminded again that he was no longer in Virginia when he threw his luggage in the back of the pickup truck and was greeted by the frozen grimace of a dead mountain lion.

"Is anything alive in this state?" was supposedly his response.

The day before, he had told us he lived in a place where it normally took over an hour to make a measly 22-mile drive. While waiting for him to arrive, it was the consensus of the group I was visiting with that we should send all the stress management training to the people living in that place.

To keep them happy so they won't want to come here.

Central City has the most cockamamie street system I have ever driven upon. (Upon my first experience driving there, I noted the best thing they could do is nuke the entire place and start over. I still hold to that opinion.) Our guest apparently agreed, accusing his driver of intentionally trying to get him lost "so that I can't ever find you again."

Learned a Haitian proverb: "A dog is just a dog, until it is in your face. Then it's Mister Dog."

One exercise called for everyone to write three items on paper, and then have them passed around. In order to get the results back to the original writer, he wanted your name on the paper, or at least a bad alias, "like Rocky or Biff".

Back half of the room broke into laughter. You see, our outfit has a Biff.

A few excerpts:

"Have you ever noticed, when the batteries are weak in the remote, the male response is to press harder?"

Sign by the Quantico shooting range: "Live firing. Drive slowly." Shouldn't that be the reverse?

"You can't get two pounds of crap out of a one-pound bag."

"Idiots have no neighborhood. We need to hunt 'em down and kill 'em."

"Sometimes your butt itches and it has nothing to do with your mother."

Another sign at Quantico: "Terrorist Alert Level = NORMAL" Have we reached a point where terrorism is "normal"?

This day's sessions got into the actual stress management course work, on causes of stress, physiology and psychology of stress (including FBI profiler examples), and steps to manage stress and anger. Pretty good stuff, from someone who has lived it and dealt with it in others.

The speaker mentioned several times the need to show respect through vocabulary and dress. He was in suit and tie for most of the sessions, occassionally relaxing enough to take the suit coat off. None of the ~100 people in the workshop (the other ~100 were here Monday and Tuesday) wore a tie, much less a suit. Hope we didn't offend him.

Think we would have respected him more if he had taken his tie off and relaxed some.

During one break, a couple guys snuck behind the podium and pinned a plastic "Junior Game Warden" badge on the lapel of the speaker's coat. Never saw his reaction, but hope he appreciated it.

Ever been to lectures where the speaker asks a question, and the entire audience sits there, unresponsive, because they can't believe they asked something so obvious? We had several cases of that (of course, just shortly after lunch, so maybe it was the food). One was when he rhetorically asked what "libido" was.

His line following the embarrassing silence? "Don't you have libidos in this state? With your winters, I would have thought you knew this."

I suppose it is in his nature and program to always find something about which to compliment his audience. In our case, he mentioned that in most of the corporate and agency world that he works, if a favorable public opinion of the group in question exceeds 50 percent, you immediately suspect survey error and run another.

Favorable public opinion of our outfit routinely runs above 90 percent. Really.

He also enjoyed our "cultural flavor," whatever that is. "You are really lucky to be here, doing what you do."

Thanks. You're right.