Excuse me. Are you a relative of mine?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Not ranty enough for the Pit.

Co-worker, “Christina”, is a toucher. Or to be precise, a grabber. As in, she’ll grab both your hands and shake your arm up and down. Why? I’m not sure; she has the least command of English of anyone in my department, maybe the whole store. I think it’s because she agreed with what I said. Or wanted to get my full attention before she replied. :dubious:

But what I’m on about was something else. I had just done a price check for a customer, and was headed back onto the floor, when, from behind, she grabbed my left elbow and put her right hand on my waist. :confused: I pull away, and she starts in with some twaddle about the product that she wants me to be sure to tell the customer before I continue helping him seek what he’s looking for.

“Excuse me. Are you a relative of mine?”

“Just tell him that!” (not angry, more as if I hadn’t spoken.)

Later, back at the registers. “Please don’t grab me from behind like that.”

“I just wanted to tell you blah blah blah.”

“Yeah, but you still don’t have to grab me.”

“What? No, I don’t grab.”

“Look, if a guy did that, it’d be harassment.”

“You let Jack touch you all the time.”

“Jack gives me the lightest tap on the arm. I barely even feel it.”

“I don’t grab! I just want to make sure you know.”

Customer comes up to the register, and that’s the end of it. For now.

But seriously, she’s always doing this! Grabbing the hand, the arm, the shoulder, and it’s very intrusive. And I don’t believe it’s a matter of, everyone does that where she’s from, because a lot of the staff here is from where she’s from, and none of them do that.

And this is just going to keep happening. Because in addition to being a grabber, she’s also Leonard Shelby. Never retains anything; always starting from scratch. And that’s when she’s around at all: shortly after this exchange, she took twenty minutes to do one transaction, most of it spent jawboning with the customers, then disappeared who knows where for half an hour. And don’t get me started on the time she imposed her “help” on a transaction that involved about twenty items, took the receipt, and made a hash mark next to each item without cross-checking them. Just made hash marks and left it at that. So I missed a throw pillow, and then she laughed*.

I dunno. I think the wrong person got fired back in July.

*And I know that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. Point is, I think we’ve all had co-workers who the best way they can “help” is just to stay the f out of the way.

2

I met KD in February, a blind date for Valentine’s Day, we’ve been shacked up most of the spring and all summer. We were discussing our family one day and discovered that our grandfathers were cousins. I naturally thought this was some kind of distant incest thread. I’ll move along. :smack:

3

What if she’s a lesbian?

4

I just want to say: nice Memento reference.

5

On the assumption that you’re looking for advice:

Have you tried at the exact moment when she touches or grabs, making a sharp exclamation as in “Aaaahhh! Don’t do that!” Combine with an exaggerated pulling away. Perhaps if this is repeated often enough simple Pavlovian conditioning might ensue. You’ve obviously tried to explain logically and specifically what you object to. If it were me, and the behavior didn’t change, I’d take the issue to management.

6

MLS, I think I will do that. Not a burlesque, of course, but just a reasonable “You scared me!”

7

Maybe she thinks of grabbing as rough handling, and if you asked her not to grasp you, it would sink in? I’d also do the “pulling away” gesture, while telling her that it is exactly that action you object to. Maybe ask one of the other workers from her culture that you can connect with how they would explain it to her? I know there are cultures in other countries that allow for much more daily contact between people, and maybe the area she grew up in was like that more than the areas the the other workers were in, or maybe the other workers are able to integrate into another culture more easily and picked up on the difference already?

8

Her behavior is completely inappropriate, whatever her intentions, and I would report the incident (and any others) in elaborate detail to management. Best to have these things on the books …

9

Or just go ahead and filr the harrassment suit
Does she do this to anyone else, or just you? If she does it to everyone, she’s merely clueless and perhaps she thinks this is a friendly gesture
If you are being singled out, it is absolutlely harrassment, no matter what her intention is. Unwanted physical interaction is a violation of your personal space - You and Jack have probably established boundaries, even if non-verbally. She apparently doesn’t respect boundaries and needs to learn every action has consequences. You’ve asked her nicely, you’ve asked her not so nicely. Time for the next step

10

No, she does it to pretty much everyone. As for the possibility of it being a cultural thing, I did ask “Mariah”, who’s of the same ethnicity, about this, and she said, “No, it’s not ‘our thing’, and frankly, I don’t like it either!”

Now, that statement gave me some food for thought. I asked myself, how do I know it’s okay when Jack taps me, and the answer was, because he always goes out of his way to be polite, and the taps are his way of saying “'scuse me”, rather than pushing past people without acknowledging them. So, factoring the grabbing in with the rest of Christina’s social pattern, I’ve concluded that it’s her way of clamoring for someone’s full attention.

Yeah, but I think the next step, rather than going to management*, will be to tell her, in so many words, “Look, I can hear you and see you. I’m not going to ignore you. Please just say what you have to say; I’m not going to walk away in the middle of your sentence or anything.” Because she does have a rather childlike attitude, and I think she just needs constant reassurance. Which I understand, but it ought to be on my terms.

I’m fairly confident that that will work. We’ll see; I’ll update as events warrant.

11

Maybe I’ve just been out of work too long and look anywhere for entertainment, or perhaps I’ve been online too long, but I vote for the following scenario as noted above:

When she grasps your hand and/or arm I’d wretch it away so dramatically as to nearly frighten her, begin slapping at your own now freed arm and start screaming “NO TOUCH, NO TOUCH”.
or:

As she grips your appendage, slowly look at her and in a very low voice, so low she stops talking to hear you and just slowly keep repeating “skin infection, highly contagious”.

I guess you could do something a little more sane like taking it to a higher up, but that has almost no entertainment value whatsoever so I’m going to assume you like my ideas better and went with one of those.