Also if a pattern emerges with said woman with other clients and other company personnel.
Regards,
Shodan
I have no doubt they keep track of that, too. Thank you for the constant reminders that the woman making the complaint is probably the problem. :rolleyes:
“Offended” is not the same thing as “annoyed.”
– admittedly, if I get called a freak for saying I find something is annoying, then I am very likely to get offended.
I am not impressed by slippery-slope arguments. Absolutely everything about human interaction can be phrased as a slippery slope.
I’m not Kimstu; but I think you’re missing the ‘some’ in the part you quoted.
I didn’t take Kimstu to be talking about everyone in the thread who’s defended some touching in the workplace, but about those who are trying to frame the ones objecting to it as being in some way not normal human beings.
I really don’t think anyone in this thread who’s objecting to the claim that touch should be the default in all workplaces is conflating pussy grabbing with being poked in the shoulder.
I think the claim that people are doing so is – maybe kind of a reverse-slippery-slope argument? I don’t know if there’s a name for it. The claim seems to be sort of ‘because people complain about x which is terrible, anybody complaining about y must be conflating it with x’. As if, because everyone agrees that you shouldn’t be force fed arsenic, nobody’s allowed to complain about someone trying over and over to get them to eat ham sandwiches.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that voting no on those terms would be interpreted as disapproving of all contact in all instances.
Somebody who thinks it’s perfectly fine for close friends to hug each other in the breakroom after one of them had a family member die would be stuck in the same category as somebody who thinks it’s perfectly fine to routinely poke other people to get their attention, even when there are six other ways to do so and they don’t know whether the other person’s fine with it.
Sorry; that’s how human interactions actually work. In order to get them to work well, all sorts of things need to be taken into account.
An ass grab and a tap on on the shoulder are the same?
Did you know that “possibly” and “probably” are different?
Regards,
Shodan
She’s probably a freakish outlier who dares to buck 1000s of years of human tradition by disliking people touching her on the wrist. What a prude!
On rereading, I think you’re right, and I apologize to Kimstu.
It’s a tricky place, to find myself arguing nominally alongside people who are, in my opinion, raising some pretty awful arguments in support of the position. Definitely makes me re-examine my own position.
At the same time, the debate is making me extra-aware of the touches that go on in my workplace, and looking at them through the most critical eye I can muster, I have a very hard time seeing them as even the slightest bit problematic. I know that good people disagree in the abstract, but I don’t see anyone at my workplace disagreeing in actuality. And I work with some strong-willed outspoken people, lemme tell you what.
I don’t mean the term hypersensitive in a pejorative fashion. It is a well known descriptor, and I have always thought it to be neutral. There are things that I am hypersensitive about.
But along with looking inward and insisting that your own personal comfort be respected and enforced, a person cannot require that society as a whole behaves in the way that he or she would like or in a way that makes that person comfortable.
And this whole light-touching thing illustrates that. Whether it has been that way for millenia, or cross societies, or however long, the default rule is that most people are not bothered by a simple light touch, or if someone wears perfume, or if someone brings a dog in a shop, or smokes a cigarette outdoors, or has music blasting out of their car as they drive by, or hears the sound of sex through an apartment wall, or any number of hundreds of other things that we put up with as the price of living in society.
Now from that non-exhaustive list, some of those might bother you and others might bother me. And if you told me that one of those things bother you, I would do my best to adjust my behavior when you were around.
But the default rule cannot be that all of those things are ratcheted down to their irreducible minimum. The law recognizes the reasonable person standard for a reason and to say that everyone is unreasonable in some things is not an insult, but a truism.
We see it in life. If you take a poll of 1000 people regarding what the speed limit should be on the highway, do we take the lowest number so that everyone feels safe? Do we take the highest number so that everyone can drive as fast as they want? Or do we set a reasonable limit?
We can take the other extreme in the workplace touching. I’m sure there are several guys in a large company that wouldn’t mind if a random female co-worker touched their genitals in the breakroom. We don’t make that the default rule either.
There has to be some sanity before setting out to conquer the next cause du jour.
Ah - you can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity cause! 
It’s certainly possible that everyone who’s working at this particular time in your particular workplace is indeed fine with it. As I said, a thing that I’ve learned reading this thread is that there are indeed a significant number of people who think that touching others to communicate at a meeting is normal workplace behavior. And if you all know each other well enough to realize that being outspoken about this particular issue won’t result in their getting deliberate trouble instead of accidental trouble (and presuming that that’s true), then maybe the reason nobody’s disagreeing openly there is that nobody in that particular group of people is disagreeing at all.
But if the new person starts running on at a meeting and you reach over and put your hand on that person to indicate that it’s time to quit talking; and instead of continuing relaxed and doing so they jump six inches, yank their hand away, glare at you, and keep right on talking (or produce a lot of other reactions, many of them less obvious) – now I hope you’ll understand what’s going on. Because, not only might the person have individual issues that you didn’t know about, but also there are a lot of people who don’t think it’s normal workplace behavior; because, in very many workplaces, it isn’t.
Asked and answered for about the fourth time. Men will sometimes reach over and touch an arm or a shoulder when talking to another guy yes. I don’t know why this is so hard for you to understand, or perhaps it just doesn’t fit into your narrative. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. It’s been done to me. It’s not aggressive or odd.
A brief, fleeting touch on the arm to get someone attention isn’t a control move or harassment. It may not be the way you would conduct business, but that doesn’t mean it’s cause to call the police. People touch each other in this world.
This is a silly exaggeration of my reasonable point. We’re not talking about universal mandates requiring that all possible physical disturbances be minimized in all possible circumstances within a society.
We’re talking about setting specific workplace default policies to minimize specific physical disturbances (such as smells and noises and touches) that we know that many people are significantly bothered by.
Yes, thank you, I should have been more clear. It is the outright dismissiveness and denigration directed at the (actually quite numerous) people who prefer not being unnecessarily touched that is raising my eyebrow a bit, not to mention my hackles.
The “We’ve always done it this way and this is the normal natural way to do it and only oversensitive weirdos would complain about it” defense is intrinsically suspect, having been used so often to normalize various forms of abusive and exploitative behavior. And if someone can’t even make that defense without exaggerating the opposing viewpoint into something ridiculously draconian via a slippery-slope argument, then that weakens their position even further.
'Sfine, and I’m sorry for ambiguous phrasing.
After all this discussion, I’m still really failing to see why the pro-touchers believe that they should be allowed to by default assume that touching a co-worker is okay. They’re aware that not everybody likes it, but they feel like they should be able to just go around grabbing people and find out who likes it by waiting to see if they get punched, or whatever. I mean, sure, I understand being selfish and lazy and not caring too much about other people, who might dislike it but suffer in silence so as not to be the bad guy, but really is it that hard not to presume?
Tired of this bait-and-switch crap, where I specify a specific part of the body and you switch it to a clothed and less intimate other part of the body. Don’t bother doing this any more-it didn’t fool people the first time any more than it did the fourth.
Any sort of sexual touching, any repeated activity after being asked to stop, and many other things. Have you never taken the Sexual Harassment training? 
That’s the same thing I ask myself during and after all the other threads we’ve had on this. Sometimes it seems like a biological imperative to touch other people at work.
It wasnt me that suggested anyone had a Mental disorder. A mild phobia is not a mental disorder, most of us have one or more. That was another poster, who you didnt bother to name.
And all of that is fine too. But what has been lost in all of this is that the office mates didn’t have issue with the touch, nor with her wanting to be touched. The issue stemmed from her, perceived overreaction to it.
She’s certainly allowed not to like it, and for it not to happen again. But she should have (per our Departments HR dictates) attempted to resolve this at the lowest level, which is peer-to-peer. Instead she choose to take this to HR, which to those that discussed this with me (the majority in the meeting) view this a significant overkill on a very minor issue at worst. The imbalance between the act and going to HR was the issue.
But this IS a slippery slope argument. This whole Thread. Look, everyone agrees that Sexual harassment, including any sort of sexual touching is inappropriate. The slippery slope now moves it down to *any sort of touching at all, *including tapping someone on the shoulder to get their attention.
In any case, some people *are *uncomfortable by direct eye contact, etc. That’s not a made up thing.
Your unfounded presumptions have not been lost in all this-Tell us how you know there weren’t previous problems with this co-worker, and tell us what you know about what was reported to HR and how you could possibly know it?