Friday, July 27, 2007

Roleplay fun in Government French class

I'm learning french for the workplace these days. This afternoon we split up in pairs and did role playing, or Joue du Role as they say in france. In today's scenario, one guy got to play the rotten deadwood employee(that's me), and the other guy got to play the fine upstanding boss who has to use his skills of negotiation to get the rotten employee to see the light and "get with the frickin program" before we hoof his ass outta here! (not possible in real life due to union regs, but I digress).
You have to use the polite french mood "Le conditionelle" for this. The "Would you, could you, should you" stuff that implies that something may happen but several factors could intervene and cause you to doubt the certainty of the outcome. Also the "subjunctive!" the "Il Faux que tu fasse..." (You MUST do this!") kinda stuff... It's all good! BUT BORING! So I decided to spice it up a bit for the afternoon. I've had some pretty difficult employees over the years, so there's plenty of material to choose from, but in the end I decided to take a page from one of my favorite books and even better movie!

Classmate Chuck started his boss spiel "I've called you in to speak to you about something that has recently come to my attention concerning your spotty attendance. Can you tell me a bit about it?".
"Mais oui! Certainment!" I said as I grabbed the front of my shirt and pretended to punch myself several times in the face(I made a big clap in front of my nose and spun by head back). My chair went flying and I fell off it under the table, spilling all my textbooks, my Becherelle, my Larousse! My french teacher on the other side of the room bolted upright in her chair (she's obviously never seen fight club - and the first rule about fight club is : We DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!)

I scrabbled up from the floor begging Charles in french to stop hitting me! I grabbed my water bottle and sprayed water on my face and hit myself with it (not really, just pretend) and dragged my bag of stuff off the table on top of me onto the ground again. Charles looks a bit concerned and tells the teacher that "toute est correct!" then he proceeds to give me an excellent employee evaluation as I sit rocking in my now-righted chair trying to find a happy place.

No one wants to be my role play partner now(sigh).

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