26th April – a gentle, apparently sympathetic and slightly geeky dude who also happened to be very polite, which I am rather partial to, stops and talks about work. This is the first actual conversation we have had. I laughingly decide to be more serious than he is, which unfortunately leads to my hearing myself saying ‘that serious thing you have going on is astonishingly beautiful’ to which he replies ‘you’d have to be awfully good at your job.’
In the weeks that follow, he suddenly appears to double in size, presumably because he feels good, and becomes quite a bit beyond astonishingly beautiful and into ‘Oh god, I cannot do that, he’s bigger than me and my eyes will be scratched out by jealous bitches.’ He has beautiful wrists, and a swan neck in particular, although its all good, broadly speaking. The clothes all change too. Not being in the shirtless man genre, I am afraid that is about as far into physical description as I can go, although he has more of a North African old school Arab look than your strictly South Asian Caucasian that you might feel more inclined to expect.
When I email him, he passes the email straight on to management who then decide that my personal business is their business, offer me counselling for my dead mother and apparently give me a warning for a perfectly polite email message.
Because he isn’t speaking but is physically flirting and appears to find my discomfort quite funny, I conclude that he is not interested, and besides there is a beautiful girl whom he seems to have a very close friendship with. As time goes on, an event in the office leads me to believe that they have a slightly kinky relationship and I offer to transfer off the shift to avoid making anyone feel bad about it apart from me.
This apparently makes him furious, he is horrible to my friend, I withdraw any sign at all of interest and start actively avoiding him. He seems to become more furious as time goes on, to the point that he can’t even hear my voice without being filled with rage.
I try to instigate conversation from my computer because it is not safe standing anywhere near him due to the rockets. (anybody who has experienced the nagging rockets will know what I mean by this. It isn’t great at work.) The first time I do this it is to ask a simple question about my work, regarding the chair I still plan to make, and the second is when I wish to give him the book I said I was going to give him on the blog. Both times he is unpleasant, but he does make one attempt to apologise verbally.
Apparently he handed both of these attempts at conversation over to the management too, and added an accusation of harassment to this. The management told me that they uphold any accusation of harassment. When I protested that none of the conversations were remotely sexual, and that I had apologised for the initial comment, they said they uphold any old allegation of harassment. They literally tried to tell me that he didn’t hate me or want me fired whilst telling me that they were escalating a problem I had already solved to get me fired.
In the meantime, I was told that he had said some pretty horrible things (unspecified) that he had questioned whether I was with a limited company or an umbrella company (this indicates that he was interested in money) that ‘it was OK I was just getting a warning’ (this from a staff member who was obviously in on the conversation. She is no longer my friend) and that ‘he was leading me on’ and ‘he isn’t a very nice person,’ in relation to me. This led me to believe that the relationship with the girl in the office was not all it seemed as it is very clear who wears the pants, and it isn’t her. Separately I am told by another two staff members that ‘there have been problems before.’ The management have apparently forgotten, since they denied this.
All of which leads me to conclude that the dude was trying to create a damaging situation and became irritated because I have other outlets than posturing at work for dealing with any ego related issues like jealousy and frustration, so didn’t show any signs of it until he angered me with his rudeness during his responses.
Not everybody is going to like you back. That’s just normal stuff. Trying to goad someone into an emotional trap is another. Why he felt the need to do anything like that I do not know, as he must be aware he was earning at least three times what I was earning.
They often think because I look happy and reasonably confident that I need to be crushed before I can be ‘feminine.’ Fuck being feminine if that is the case. Take the budgie you’re smuggling to someone who wants to play the little woman. I’d much rather be me, and if you can’t deal with it, don’t look.
Not terribly worried about his not finding me attractive, it was an out-of-character moment to say anything in the first place. The idea that I was to be repeatedly humiliated with a view to making me angry enough to be canned for misconduct is pretty insulting, or whatever it was that he wanted other than that. I fear for the staff, personally.