Plot
Manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell)'s controversial imitation of a Chris Rock routine forces the staff to undergo a racial diversity seminar. Michael refuses to allow Mr. Brown to control the seminar, instead attempting to assist him in teaching, much to Brown's chagrin. However, when confidentially informed by Brown that the seminar was not meant for the staff, but instead only for Michael, he decides to create his own seminar. Michael is seen later on in the episode signing the release form Mr. Brown passed around, with the name "Daffy Duck". Mr. Brown does not realize the signature is bogus, at any time in the show.
Michael hastily fashions his own more ambitious and improvisational program, under the name "Diversity Tomorrow" ("because today is almost over"). He first asks the employees to detail their particular ethnicities, helpfully offering that he is a "virtual United Nations" of English, Scottish, Irish, German and "2/15 Native American Indian" origins.
Michael assigns each staff member an index card with a different race written on it. They are not allowed to read the card, wearing it on their foreheads for others to see. He then compels the employees to interact and "mix up the melting pot." Thus, Michael reasons, they will learn how it is to "be a minority" (Scott has no card for "Arab" or "Muslim", because, he explains, it would be "too explosive").
Salesman Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) desperately tries to close on an important annual sale that makes up about 25% of his annual commission. In the chaos of the day, it is Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), another salesman, who closes the sale for himself. Nevertheless, when Jim's love interest, Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer), falls asleep on his shoulder at the end of the meeting, he concludes that it was "not a bad day."
Read more about this topic: Diversity Day
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)