Flag Training Part One

(Photo is me, on a day off at Clearwater Beach in Florida)

“Nancy!”, the Technical Secretary screamed, looking straight at me.

I was on my Internship after completing a round of theory and practical training. Here I was doing real auditing sessions, at Flag, no less. The Mecca of Technical Perfection!

Studying Scientology was easy for me. It was all new information coming in. Being raised in the Scientology bubble I had no background to compare it to, so I had very little conflict with the material I was reading.

“Nancy!”, I hear again. He was looking straight at me.

I looked behind me, nobody there. “Uh, my name is Sunny, are you talking to me?”

Just then the Director of Processing came up too next to the Technical Secretary.

“Nancy, let’s go! Get in session.”

I was confused.

The Julian Swartz came up, smiled at me, and said “has anyone told you that you look like Nancy Kerrigan?”.

Oh. The ice skater that had been hit in the knee. It was the big news of the time.

And that was how I became known as Nancy for the next year of training I did at Flag.

Everyone called me Nancy from there on. I just shrugged it off. These guys were just entertaining themselves and found it humorous. I didn’t care.

My Internships at Flag were easy. I had to show I could do a nine hour day, which was time in session. Not setting up, not paperwork, but across from a preclear, giving auditing commands and running the session. I also had to get a person through specific auditing steps. Most people on an Internship had no trouble with those steps.

It was the video pass that got everyone.

See, every auditing room at Flag is set up with cameras at multiple angles and microphones. The sessions could be watched while in progress by anyone who had access to the video room, as they called it.

If you wanted to record the session (such as for the Internship, like I was doing, or, sometimes it was required on certain preclears or even auditors. Often a flubbing auditor would be required to record all sessions so the big cheese executives could figure out what the auditor was doing wrong and correct it).

It was always human error, never Scientology being flawed, as the reason.

Anyway, back to my training, I recorded the very first session I ever gave there. I turned it in and it was approved all the way up to RTC, the big guys at the top who gave the final approval to complete the internship….

There are many, many aspects of the auditing session that could be flunked, or failed, such as proper session preparation, auditor mood and ability to say commands clearly, accurate interpretation of the meter, and so forth. It was rejected by RTC. Everything on it was good, just a small error: the e-meter reaction, which has various names based on the size of the reaction, was noted incorrectly by me.

The next video I sent in passed. Same day.

An Internship normally was expected to take three weeks. Most went way over that. I finished it in 10 days.

It was the first of many Internships and videos that I would do at Flag.

Remember the toilet scrubbing we were subjected to?

I’ll tell you what, I didn’t get that toilet scrubbing order on the Internship. I made it through no problem. But I was not immune to punishment, it just came later.

But I’ll tell you what. Those toilets were sparkling. Flag has the cleanest toilets I have ever seen.

And that’s because they had hundreds of trainees and there was always at least 10 or 15 of them who spent a few hours after midnight cleaning them with a toothbrush.