When I was 17 I worked setting up appointments for our salesmen. I was sitting in my Boss’ (who was in his mid-forties) office one day and I asked him how I could earn more money. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. He put a $100 bill on his desk and said “Monday night”, another $100 bill and said “Tuesday night”, another $100 bill and said “Wedneday night” and so on… I walked out and never went back. He was a pig, but I never realized how bad he was until that moment.
True story.
Same here, except it was a career in the military, especially in the late 60s/early 70s, before all of the racial incidents in the military brought the advent of sensitivity training. But even then. . . I’ll bet I heard every racial and ‘fag’ joke ever thought up by every halfwit in the country. The casual use of racial epithets was actually shocking to me, as I’d never heard that sort of talk in my semi-sheltered upbringing.
As a bit of contrast, I saw a guy play the racism card to his advantage for years before finally getting fired from a government job. I had heard stories of how he literally slept at his desk and no one did anything. After a reorganization, he and I wound up in the same branch, and I had personal experience with his worthlessness. We were assigned a particular task. I set things up with the third person involved and told this engineer when and where we were to meet. I don’t know what it means that he refused to even look at me when I was talking to him. But he didn’t show up and I ended up doing his part of the task.
When he’d get low eval marks, he’d file a grievance, claiming it’s because he was black. His supervisors dealt with it by transferring him from office to office, but no one ever documented anything. It’s as if everyone was terrified of being called a racist for coming down on him.
The final straw came when his boss’s boss saw him in the corridor and said “Come to my office.” The big boss kept walking to his office, and the slacker turned off at the next corridor and disappeared. He was fired shortly thereafter. The only job he could get was at a hardware store - I think that speaks to his abilities as an engineer. I have to admit, I wondered if he played the race card to get his degree.
And for the record, for the most part, the organization was pretty good about developing and advancing women and minorities when they asked for the opportunities. But if you just wanted to coast, you coasted at your lower paygrade.
My Mother-in-law is the most experienced certified nurse midwife at her hospital. And if the patient wants to have some sort of new age spirituality stuff going on with her delivery, she’ll accommodate them within the limits of what is medically safe (or merely harmless) which I think is going above and beyond the call of duty since she doesn’t get paid extra for putting up with the nonsense. But she has patients that refuse to have her as a nurse when they find out she’s Roma.
Some of you might remember my “Bosshole” stories from the Workplace Griping Pit thread a few years ago. Guy was a complete asshole. I had to hire a new cashier and I was told I had to let anyone apply but he would only approve me hiring a white person. I wound up hiring a little old white lady and he says, “Couldn’t you find a man to do it?”
After our business got robbed at gun point one of our workers piped up with “see, this is why nobody likes black people!” right in front of the black cop who was taking our statements.
I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen much non-PC behaviour by co-workers, or those around me in the workplace.
Now, customers are another matter. Our cafe has one sandwich with bacon, ham, and turkey on it. Once customer asked for this sandwich, without the bacon. Then he brought it back fuming because of the ham. “I’m a Muslim, I’m not supposed to have pork1” Well duh, the ingredients are listed on the menu board. The rest of us thought he was just trying to get his moeny back.
Then one time a guy came in and asked to speak to a manager, and our kitchen manager at the cafe introduced herself. “No, I want a MALE manager!” says the customer.
Back in the mid 1980’s, when I was in baking school, we had a three day session of special classes on management issues in the industry. Now the class of about sixty people was 85/15 male female. One guy in our class spoke up to one instructor, who was speaking about management issues in an industry that has more men than women. This guy in our class said “he didn’t thing women should be in management positions because they are too emotional, there’s this thing that happens to them every month.” We women bared out teeth, unsheathed our claws and were preparing to spring on him, but the instructor defused the situation in a way I’ve admired ever since. He leaned forward, opened his eyes really wide and asked “Are you talking about their raging hormones?” Every one of us, except for the inquirer, collapesed in laughter, and that was that.
My mother worked with a receptionist who once looked out into the waiting room and announced, “There’s a nice-looking colored man out there. Why, you could almost shake his hand!”
Another time, when Mom was organizing a buffet for a work event that would include some black clients, this receptionist suggested that Mom get some meat: “They like meat.”
I thought I had heard just about every racist stereotype, but black folks liking meat was a new one.
In the 18 years I spent working as (usually) the sole female in professional kitchens, I’m quite sure I witnessed every possible sexist, racist, homophobic bullying type of bullshit possible. It was like working on a pirate ship. Fortunately, having been brought up by a most excellent hard-ass bitch of a mom, I was able to hold my own, and it was actually a lot of fun.
Fast forward many years and I’m an administrative assistant in a public university in New England. This isn’t quite the hotbed of obvious discrimination, but I am occasionally surprised. Our custodian is Mexican, and he’s great - always smiling and does a wonderful job without complaint. His supervisor, John, is a slovenly fat white guy who likes to make comments like “Jose, make sure you get that floor clean or I’ll call Homeland Security!”. Quel douche. Fortunately, that company was outbid for the cleaning contract, so John is now out of a job. Jose, on the other hand, was hired by the new company. Boo-yaaaa, bigot John!
My co-worker made some ignorant comment about how she loves the show Glee so much, but she just can’t stomach having to see the boys kiss or something like that. Followed by the usual stupid crap about “Why do they have to shove it in people’s faces? I don’t want to see two guys or two girls making out, euuuw!”. I enjoyed calmly telling her about my mom and her partner of 34 years, my brother, and all of my gay friends who have the same rights as she and her husband do, and why shouldn’t they be able to hold hands or kiss in public like anyone else? She’s learning.
Thought of another:
My brother was on a flight from CA to CT at some point, and was seated next to an older Asian woman who didn’t appear to speak any English. When it came time for meals to be handed out, the stewardess asked if she would like the chicken or the (whatever, I don’t remember). This lady didn’t understand, so my brother whipped out his trusty sketchpad and did a quick sketch of a chicken and a hamburger for her to choose from. The stew handed her a meal and condescendingly remarked to my brother “They usually like chicken.”
Not racist, sexist or homophobic but a different and not uncommon discrimination in my field:
A relatively newly hired attorney came to me to discuss a case she had been assigned. She started out talking about the logistics of getting a draft done and to the judge, then segued into the challenges of the legal analysis. (She is the type of person who needs someone to listen to as she talks her way through a problem. Fair enough.) Now, I am not hampered by a Juris Doctorate degree but I have been doing my job for a long time. This discussion was not my first rodeo around the issue of search-and-seizure. I made a suggestion to her about looking at a particular case that had recently issued and asked pertinent questions about the facts. It was a lively discussion and she felt it had helped clarify her thinking. As she was leaving, she said to me, “you know, for a secretary, you are very smart. You should think about going to law school.” :dubious:
I wish I could say that was the only time this has happened to me. It isn’t.
You don’t see much of this in a university setting. I can think of only one case. When a man applied for a job in the office as a secretary/typist, our admin refused to hire him because it would upset the girls in the office. That may have 30 years ago. Just a few years previous, that admin had been of the “girls in the office”. Maybe 10 years ago, she hired a male for the same position (except there was now little typing to do since we all typed out own articles by that time). He worked there until last winter when he left, presumably to take another position in the university. I never asked the admin why she had changed her mind. Perhaps she realized that what she had done was sexist.
You know I forgot to mention this case where a guy kept sexually harassing my wife at work. I guess it wasn’t that bad because she married me anyway.
I suppose you could call that “classism”, maybe? “Professional snobbery”? If you are of a charitable disposition, you could interpret her remark as “For a secretary [not formally trained in law school], you sure are smart [about the law]!” But it was a stupid and unprofessional thing to say. At best, she is an insensitive twit. (Not to mention violating one of the cardinal rules of office work: Never Piss Off The Person Who Manages The Paperwork.)
Ugh, I forgot about that one, and I have experienced that at the university. People seem so surprised that one knows anything about [whatever, fill in the blank] in addition to our magical mastery of Outlook and changing the toner cartridge. As though an entire group of people do nothing but sit around reading romance novels and organizing our beanie babies in our spare time. :rolleyes:
When I was 14-25 I worked restaurant and retail jobs, mostly one of each. Sexual harassment was pretty much the cultural norm. I was going to make this comment only about the restaurant, but in retrospect the retail store wasn’t much different. The was from 1994-2005.
In the restaurant sexual innuendo between waitresses and cooks, hostesses and managers, the owner’s mom and the chefs- everything went. There were 2 chef/owners who brought Hustlers on the line, invited waitresses to screw in the alley, etc. I watched one of them ask a waitress during her interview ask if she ever experimented sexually with other women. I was a (male) cook and was constantly groped by waitresses, sat on, etc. For the most part I didn’t mind. It was typical that many co-workers were “dating.” The main male owner had affairs with a lot of dining room staff. His nephew (whose wife was a dining room manager) was always drinking and screwing downstairs. I was born knowing gay couples and interracial couples. Most of the male waiters were openly gay and sometimes coupled. So that’s something that never seemed out of the norm to me, but there were a lot of homophobic comments. It always seemed like it was not meant in a mean way, though. Maybe that makes it worse. I’m just saying there was a lot of joking that obviously wasn’t meant to hurt anyone or make anyone appear inferior, but it would be WAY over the line by today’s standards. Racial comments were usually limited to Mexican employees saying things in Spanish.
There’s a guy in my present workplace who is extremely homophobic. He once said, and was 100 percent serious as far as I could tell, that all the gay people should be sent to an island and then the island should be nuked. Also, when gay marriage was legalized earlier this year here in Florida (before the Supreme Court case) he ripped up the break room newspaper that announced it on the front page.
1994-2005 is not as long ago as it may seem from your vantage point. :dubious:
In the late 1980s, I worked in a restaurant with a Caucasian guy who, whenever black people came in, would start throwing things around and cursing, and saying things like, “I think all those $%^&ing n-words should be sent back to Africa! Or better yet, just line them up against a wall and shoot them.” :mad: He would especially go off the rails if a black man and white woman came in together - and even did that when such a pair in business suits came in and, after I took their order, they opened their briefcases and started talking about some multi-million dollar deal they were working on. :smack:
The really weird thing about this is that he was in an interracial relationship! His girlfriend, whom he later married, was of Hawaiian descent. (But that was OK.)
As for sexual activity in a restaurant, I can only think of 2 incidences (that I know of, I’ll admit) in all the years I worked in that industry.
One was at that same restaurant, when someone walked into the dry storage room, and walked in on a female cook giving a BJ to another cook. OK, I’ll admit, they lived together, but folks, um, go home first, KWIM?
The other was when I worked at a hotel banquet server while I was in college, and a man and woman who were guests at a wedding reception (NOT the bride and groom, either!) were caught going at it in the coffee shop, which was closed in the evenings. They got caught because the cubbyhole they chose was in full view of the main hallway. :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: