When you plan to have 100,000 supervisors spending two hours away from their main duties to focus on sexual harassment issues, it's a no-brainer to include gorillas asking to see nipples as one of the real-life example.

I suspect the company I work for (I'm the senior editor) created the online harassment program mentioned. Besides the Koko case from the news, we took the parrot part from another case where the Court actually explained that the "employer" (a hospital) was responsible for stopping the sexual harassment of its employees, whether the harasser is a co-worker, non-employee (an independent contractor doctor in that case), or even a parrot.

The law requiring training AB 1825 (btw: for awhile I was keeping a blog going at http://ab1825.blogspot.com but there hasn't been any news worth reporting about the law for months) created a demand for about 1.7 million California supervisors to be trained -- to spend two hours training. (The company I work has been hired by the employers of over 100,000 of these potential students.)

To keep adult minds engaged and to be respectful of their cooperation is a challenge that we tried to meet by using colorful, contemporary, and legally-significant real-life cases to educate and entertain the supervisors who take our course.

The same training also includes examples about an unfortunately-obvious penile prothesis implant and avoiding disability discrimination, and the California Supreme Court case involving the writers of the Friends TV show who talked about masturbation and having sex with the stars, but weren't responsible for sexually harassing an assistant who had to take notes about their offensive jokes, since the writers weren't directing their sexual conduct to her.

More recently, we reported on a case in which a San Diego crime lab wasn't liable even though a female worker discovered her ex-boss' stash of corpse porn, since, as the Court explained, "pornography depicting necrophilia might not have the same shocking overtones there" (you can see our story at http://www.lawroom.com/story.asp?STID=1730 online).

Unfortunately for everyone's productive time, the 10-second anti-harassment course (i.e., "treat everybody with respect") is one hour and 59 minutes and 50 second short of the requirement set by the law signed by the people's governor. Since it was our hope that people taking our course would not feel like it was a total fraking waste of time, our intent was to make it entertaining, informative, engaging, and memorable.