~~~
Day’?s Verse:
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks.
Among all her lovers there is none to comfort her.
All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies.
Lamentations 1:2
~~~

Actually, I don’t think something that never happened can fail. But here’s the tale anyway.

Once upon a time, a girl was turning 23 and her husband decided to invite people over to celebrate that momentous occasion (almost a month early, since all her friends were leaving before her real birthday). So he thought and he planned with the girl and they came up with an idea: An ice cream party. Instead of presents for the girl, everybody would bring a different type of ice cream, and they would all try some of each.

So the husband asked all the girl’s friends what days would work for them, and they picked a date, Saturday, May 5^th. The party would start at 1:30 in the afternoon, a perfect ice-cream eating time. Many friends agreed to come, and lots of different types of ice cream were expected to make an appearance. The party looked like it would be lots of fun.

Then, a few days before the party, the girl was at work and talked to a coworker. The coworker said, “I keep forgetting about the class on Saturday,” and suddenly the girl’s heart sank. She was going to that class, too. She checked, and sure enough, the class, which she had signed up for months before, was the same day and time as the party her husband had planned for her. But it ended mid-afternoon. The girl hoped that her friends would understand and not be busy later that day.

With a heavy heart, the girl told her friends she had to move the time. Surely pushing the party back a few hours couldn’t make that much of a difference. But somehow the girl knew the outcome, and her day was ruined. Slowly, over the course of the next few days, every one of the friends who had agreed to attend her party told her or her husband that they were busy.

The girl had to cancel the party because nobody could come. The girl felt very sad. She had wanted the ice cream, but even more, she had wanted to spend time with those people. She knew many of them would be gone for a long time. She might not ever see that group together again. And so she felt very disappointed, all because she had forgotten about her class.

It was all the girl’s fault, but she tried not to feel too unhappy. Trying to perk her up, her husband suggested going out to eat at a nice restaurant in the town where her class was being held. But the restaurant had closed, so even that plan failed.

The end.

So my weekend, which looked bright five days ago, now looks grim and full of AMWA training that my company expects me to do on my own time. I have a question: Is it reasonable to charge overtime for the hours I do training for my job? My boss said that the other writers do this training on their own time, but I strongly feel that since it is totally job-related, I should get paid for the weekend hours I spend in that darn copy-editing class.