Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

First, I insist that a law be passed specifically for the women in my workplace. They will not be allowed to wear the fashionable ballerina slippers with pants that are too long. In fact, if I had my druthers, they would have to wear them with pants that are not flare-legged or bell-bottomed. Tapered slacks, sure. Peg legs, sure. Crops, sure — though it’s already the case that we can’t wear them. Our friggin’ dress code is pretty complicated if you ask me. You can wear crop pants if, and only if, they are worn with a sweater set or as part of a pantsuit. Yepper.

I laughed my ass off one day when this guy from the product group was checking out the HR’s dress code guide. He and another guy were looking at the women’s acceptable shoes section, saying, “I don’t get that one. The acceptable sandals look just like the unacceptable ones.” Of course, when curiosity got the better of me and I joined them hoping to spy a genuine contradiction in the dress code, it turned out they just didn’t understand subtle differences in sandals. A heeled sandal, OK. Flat? no way.

So, OK, I’m just kiddin’ about the ballerina slippers because, at the time I noticed this phenom, I just needed something to be cranky about. Lettin’ off steam about something completely insignificant and just ranting inside my head. I’m tired. No day off last week. But I was thrilled yesterday when we met with “the business” — the internal client for whom we are building this web site. I led the meeting, giving them an overview of what bugs were left, what had been moved to “enhancement” and why, and feeling pretty good about the fact that, at least with the business, they appreciate my picky bitch bug reporting. I remember looking up — I had my eyes cast on the list of bugs before me as we were sitting around a small round table. And all of them were staring, mouths open a bit. I didn’t know what to do, so I stopped talking. And then N said, “We’re sorry. Just haven’t seen anyone so thorough.”

I blushed. And then made some remark that I hoped would make the behavior, not stellar, but ordinary. I think I did something Amber recently complained about re: job candidates during interviews. Maybe I need to work on that.

Today I realized something. I would like to do an ethnography of elevator behavior and norms. I noticed that I do what I always do when someone else is on the elevator: we both take up places opposite one another. When the other gets off *snort* I move to the center. Why is that? Striving for some kind of weird balance as I ride the floors? Who the fuck knows.

Also, I continue to be amazed at how a middle class workplace is so . . . aloof. Not even to mention, at least in tech, so freakin’ male. I said to R a couple of months ago that I wanted to have a conversation with my director. In my head, it seems that the normal thing to do would take him to lunch. But in practice? This seems like dangerous territory. There is something awkward feeling, in this workplace, about the idea that a woman take a man to lunch. And yet, I got the idea when I saw the design team manager strolling back from lunch with Webdev Director.

So you know what? I finally said fuck it. The day he called me into his office and asked me to shut the door, I did and turned around and cringed and said, “ugh. shutting the door huh?” He said, “No no, this is, I hope, a good meeting.” Me: “Oh, I know. I was just teasing.” (I knew because I’d helped other teams earlier that week and this made people happy.) Then, I said: “I’m glad you asked me in because I have a few questions and, well, I’d like to work with you on this reorganization. I know that might sound a little premature, I’ve only been an employee for two months. But I think I have a lot to learn, but may also have something to contribute. While I don’t want to take up your time, now, I was hoping I could take you out to lunch in the next couple of weeks….”

And you know, it was funny. He looked surprised and pleased. Do you know that look on someone’s face where they are pleased to be fed or given a nice big plate of yummy looking food or something they really like?

Well, that was the look. And it occurred to me, thinking about Larry Hirschhorn’s work on organizations, he probably doesn’t get taken out to lunch — where someone else treats that is. He’s new here and he’s changing things around, and to do so, he’s probably found himself doing a lot of public praising, to take the sting out of it. And he’s probably felt himself having to give a lot in order to perform the way he needs to in order to please his bosses. So, he spends a lot of time praising and looking for good stuff — even when we hear rumors that a lot of crankiness and happiness has gone down.

And not only that, when he’s had to criticize, he’s probably felt like the bad guy. And of course no one’s been thanking him for jack shit. He’s been going up against the business, having to defend sometimes shoddy work. He’s been working long hours, here in the morning for early morning launches.

Put it this way, the guy’s been bending over backward to give us all strokes that I had a dream one night that he was going around giving us all foot rubs. He insisted. We had to have them, because that’s what his job was, to bring us into his office, take off our shoes and rub our feet. HA. I had a hard time not thinking about that dream for the first couple of days I had it. I get up from my cube, glance a sidelong glance at his office and try to picture it.

So, he responded to my offer of lunch with a kind of … I don’t know how to explain it. Neediness? Feeling gratified? It was almost an over-the-top (especially for him) show of pleasure.

Which is weird for him, but also weird for this workplace. Whether this is the norm, I don’t know. But there is an aloofness I can’t ever remember experiencing elsewhere. Take the restroom. In a working class environment, it’s a place to gab and joke. Not so, here. Maybe it’d be different with more women. But see, the thing is, we are two quads on the floor, and the female-male ratio among developers and database dweebs is something like 1-5. The other two quads, the ratio is reversed, since they aren’t techy units. Once in a while, I will walk in to hear a woman, sitting on the john, yakking away at someone outside. I always love that, the muzzled sound of straining to pee or wipe in a tight stall, which makes the voice pinched and a little distracted sounding. But this doesn’t happen often.

Speaking of which, what do you do when you walk into the restroom, get a whiff of someone’s recent dump, and realize it’s your boss as she departs the stall and you wonder if you should choose her warm and scented one or the other. Which would be more insulting? Acceptable? Hmmm? Lookee: it’s a new blog. I’m trying to see what kind of search terms I gather with potty talk, ‘k? Not really. I’m just in a mood. Obviously, slightly scatological, my mood.

Speaking of which2, I was way to busy to blog when this was going on, but over the summer and into the early fall, we had several women’s room incidents. It’s a new building and people were quite apalled when, almost immediately, signs had to be installed asking women to keep it neat.

After awhile, it just kept getting weirder and weirder. And, boy, did I often think about those ridiculous conversations about transwomen and how men are messy and stink up bathrooms and stuff. I mean, seriously, there is this notion that women are neater, cleaner. I have never agreed with that sentiment at all, and this experience just solidified my view.

So, the incidents. Or, rather, incidents. There was obviously at least one person, perhaps more, who clearly had a fear of their own shit and piss. There were the usual things such as spraying the seat or the inevitable failure of automatic flush to flush. There was an increasing amount of pubic hair wandering to the floor or left on the seat. The unflushed tampons. And the broken tampon and pad disposal boxes because they hadn’t trained staff to put them back in properly. The consequence? By 3 pm, the damn place looked like there were wrestling matches in the stalls, with the boxes having fallen out of the stall walls and the contents spilled to the floor.

Swank new office building looked the a college town bar’s restroom at two a.m.

It just got weirder. Someone with the hershey squirts who didn’t make it to the toilet fast enough and couldn’t be bothered to wipe up her mess. Someone who changed a tampon and got blood all over the seat who, likewise, couldn’t be bothered. Then, the penultimate incident: someone took a big messy shit, which sat in a pillow of wads and wads of toilet paper. I’m telling ya: a wads and wads of toilet paper in little poofs, upon which sat this huge shit, a major cow patty perched on top. But the kicker was this. The person who left the big shit and didn’t flush? The toilet seat was just lined and lined and lined with toilet paper, as women sometimes do.

I walked in and saw it and, at first backed away, covering my mouth. Initially, it was to cover an ugh and grimace, the covering of the mouth you do when surprised and stunned and want to say, “oh my.” But that quickly turned into a covering to stifle my internal giggles over the fact that someone was that fastidious — we’re talking about 5 layers of toilet paper there to protect her pristine ass — about the germs she’d get sitting on a toilet. And yet, it apparently didn’t occur to her to flush the toilet. Which is why I say that, I think this person had a serious distaste for her own waste, so much so that she couldn’t bear the thought of cleaning up after herself. Yet, it never occurred to here that someone else might not want to clean up after her.

That was about 3 pm. The next day, when I got into work, it was still there and nice and stanky by this point. I decided to use the restrooms elsewhere.

The topper was when, finally, someone just smeared shit all over the walls.

The weeks that ensued featured one on one meeting with, I kid you not, the company attorney — who solidified my distaste for attorneys. Sorry andie. What also became evident was the racism from the tech women, against the mostly black women in the other quads who were conceived of as the source of the problem. More on that, later, but if you’ll remember my agonizing over racism in the workplace and how to handle it, you’ll understand that the picture is a little more complicated.