Ah yes. I think I may have had to stop at exactly *one* stoplight all the way home tonight. The left turn lane from Jackson to N. Maple wasn’t even backed up. I sailed right on through.

We had just a wee bit of that loverly white stuff today. Nothing that stuck anywhere, just an occasional few teensy tinesy flakes spitting at us. Dark wintery clouds and blustery winds. I haven’t managed to connect with The Commander yet today but Mushie posted Yooperland photooos on facebook. Ten inches at his house on the shore of Whitefish Bay. I don’t actually *know* Mushie in real life. He went to school with one of my much older cousins. But I accept all facebook friend requests that come from Soo High folks, whether or not I recognize the name.

The LSCHP was in fine form today and kept telling me (and others) things like “none of your business” when we yelled snarky questions over the wall. Am I offended by this kind of talk? Not on your life. This is a guy with a personality as big as the universe. I can’t describe him, he has to be experienced. But he is always respectful of all of his co-workers, especially those who work for him. I always feel like he has my back in the rare event that there is some weird sort of little kerfuffle on the horizon.

Although I have endured my share of on-the-job sexual harassment and gender discrimination in my life, I have been lucky that I have never had to deal with this kind of crap coming from a supervisor. Back in my first “career”, I worked for Byron and I will never forget the day (in the 1980s) that I and the young woman who handled the “window” walked into our boss’s office to find him printing ASCII pictures of nude women on his dot matrix printer. He had downloaded them from the Merit Network (aka them thar tubes). Were we freaked out? No way. We were laughing so hard we were just about doubled over as we left the room! Why was this okay? Because, in all the years I worked for Byron, I *never* felt threatened by him for anything for even one nano-second. He was respectful of all of us who worked for him — and we were a diverse group — and he routinely deferred to me when a technical problem came up that he knew I could handle better than he could. ASCII nudes? Not a problem.

I’m not sure how I got started on this and I’m not sure where to go with it. I want to tell young women (and I know this happens to men too) to fight back. I know that it isn’t always easy and I don’t know what to say about that. Hold your head up. Do your job (and more if you can) so well that other people in your organization notice your work. Find another job if it gets that bad.

Finally… Don’t listen to KW because KW has NO IDEA about how to find jobs. She *hates* interviews and stuff. She falls off cliffs into jobs. Do not under any circumstances emulate her strategy for finding jobs!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.