Just want to vent, really (Long work story)

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m putting this in the pit because it’s really just a rant. I don’t have a question and I don’t mean to start a debate.

Yesterday at work I was playing the role of office grunt. At times I am the office supervisor by title, at others the supervisor by function. I have several coworkers who have similar “multi-hatted” positions. Yesterday, I was at the very bottom of the chain of command.

I was having a standard interaction with a customer, answering several specific questions. He gave me the necessary particulars and I found all the pertinent information and then asked to whom I was speaking. I was told that I was speaking to the fiance of the woman whose information I had in front of me. Almost before he asked for details, I told him, “We don’t give out personal information.” (It is a company policy, even for relatives.) His immediate response was, “Why? Because I sound black!?” I have gone over this episode in my head so much since, that I can’t honestly say whether I had made any such distinction before he said that. It seems to me that he started talking differently at that point, almost adopting an affectation. (Looks like you would have to join the Onion premium or wait for a new article to enjoy the full lampoon effect, but Mr. Kornfeld is a skinny white accounts receivable type.)

A little back story: I used to work at a liquor store in South Minneapolis where there was a lot of racial tension. My experience was that whenever someone made an accusation of racism-- regardless of whether the accusee was indeed a racist (and, yes, there were such people around)-- the accuser was up to something.

I become a broken record. We don’t give out that kind of information. That’s not information I can give out. We don’t give out that kind of information. That’s not information I can give out. And he becomes a red flag machine. “What, do you think I’m going to beat my wife?” (you said it, not me) “Are you stupid or something?” (styoopid is as styoopid does, duh-huh) “Why would I be stalking my fiance?” (Who said anything about stalking?) “Do you even know how to find out?” (I think I’m a-sposed to use this here typey board.) etc.

I finally put him on hold with the comment, “Let me ask my supervisor.” In the past, I have found that I can just ask one of my fellow grunts to play the role of supervisor just so that customers hear the same story from two people. However, it was a busy afternoon and everyone was buried. The titular supervisor (te hee) would have just said to tell him we can only give that information to the police since he knows I am a sometime supervisor myself.

Cut to the chase. I get back on the phone with him and say,“That’s not information I can give out.” The guy goes off on me! “Why you doin’ me like that? You a bitch! Mother fuckin’ white trash faggot,” along with several other maledictions in the white-boy theme. Then he hangs up.

I really felt like shit. I have a hard time letting go confrontations like that and this one really got to me. Not only did I not make any judgment about him based on his color (assuming he was black), but he made an assumption about me based on my professional phone voice, then proceeded to hurl racial epithets and insults because he thought I was being racist. (A white racist no less!) WTF.

With an injured sense of wanting to lash out: I think I understand why people are racist!

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All you have to know is that this guy was a piece of shit. Forgetaboutit.

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I find this sort of behavior infuriating because, while I am white, I feel strongly that racism is a terrible evil and a blight on society and these people who are crying wolf are just making racism a meaningless word.

I had an employee in my training class report me for ‘racism’. The reason? She strolled into job training 15 minutes late and talking on her cell phone, loudly disrupting the class. When she was seated, she pulled out a styrofoam container filled with eggs and hash browns and spread out over everything, loudly eating and commenting on the food to the person next to her. I asked her to put it away. She said she needed to eat. I explained to her that class had started some time ago, so we needed to get started and her focus needed to be on what was being taught.

She was mad because I didn’t chide all the people who slid in late a few minutes. Our policy is that we don’t deal with disciplinary issues in front of other people, unless necessary (someone is being disruptive, they refuse to come to a meeting with a manager, etc.) I wasn’t attempting to discipline her for being late, I was trying to stop her from distracting the class from the computer training.

However, the way she told my manager was that she came in with a group of people (wrong), that other people were late too (right, but they were there and settled when you were piling food in your mouth and talking around it) and that I had “called her out” and yelled at her for being late while white students were allowed to be late (yeah, right). In fact I had already documented the lateness and the number of minutes late for each student and had already sent it to their temp agency to have a word with them about it. I was glad that form was in on time!

My manager called me in and almost apologetically explained the situation. I explained what happened, and then invited her to come to my training class. I asked if we could go ahead and send our temporary service representatives right to the class to immediately pull people out who were late to give them a warning (since lateness and getting settled were clearly an issue). She said that was a good idea. Within a few days, the person who accused me was fired (not by me).

Thanks, bitch, for trying to get me to lose my job so you could keep yours for a few more days. I had to kind of laugh, though – in high school, my major activity was co-president in Human Relations Committee (anti-intolerance group) and I still have my plaque given to me by my high school for MLK day thanking me for “keeping the dream alive”. My workplace is incredibly diverse and I like it that way. We have lots of folks of various races and countries of origin, gay folks, transgendered folks, various religions, what have you.

This isn’t the only time I was accused of racism, but it was the only time where it was taken to my management. There was when one young female worker, African-American, who kept trying to pool all the black people together into this collective front of people who hated whitey. I found this pretty humorous considering our management is pretty atypical for “The Man” – at the time, nearly entirely female, and including one Asian man and one Hispanic woman. Since I am a white supervisor, I was one of the targets, despite not knowing the person and having maybe talked to them one time (when they were not working and hovering around one of my employees’ desks, making it difficult for them to focus on their phone work). Fortunately, most people realized she was full of it. She was since fired for trying to scam us by falsifying timecards. She went around telling people that she was fired for being “too real” about being oppressed, blah blah blah. Whatever.

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Based on your account, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a stalker calling. He knew which buttons to push to make you feel bad and hoped that that would make you more likely to give him the information. Once all hope was lost, he turned on the vitriol. (Whereas the typical love-struck romeo wouldn’t have wanted to make things ugly for his fiancee who still needs to deal with you.)

Who knows whether he was black or white, and who cares? You did the right thing.

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I work as a waitress in a resturant that also has a nightclub. Being around guys with alcohol is an interesting experience. Luckily, I am ‘cute’ rather than ‘sexy’ and I get a lot of guys pinching my cheeks instead of slapping my ass. When guys hit on me, I’ve learned to just smile and try to make my escape.

Once, this Persian guy kept trying to get me to talk to him more and being obnoxious. When I finally made it clear that I wasn’t interested, he said “Oh, don’t like the brown people?” or something like that and made it seem like the reason I wasn’t into him was because I didn’t like non-white people. If I wasn’t at work, I would’ve had a few choice things to say to him, but instead I just rolled my eyes and walked away. It was terribly ironic because I actually generally prefer the look of asian men over white men!