At Work All Women are Secretaries
So I am sitting in my cube today, doing my job. I am trying to concentrate on something when the guy in the cube next to me puts a customer on hold and asks me to look up something for him. I tell him he is able to look that up from the database we all have access to. He asks me to do it again. I tell him again, he can open that up on his own desktop and look it up. He says “But I have someone on hold!” Finally I give in, stop what I’m doing, and look it up for him, while informing him I can’t do it any faster than he could himself. In fact it took longer because then I had to tell him over the wall the information he needed, and spell it, whereas he could have directly looked at it had he just opened the file himself. Then he was still sure of how to spell it after I told him three times so he had to come over to look at what I’d pulled up on my computer. Meanwhile his customer sat on hold.
Now he is down the hall in a meeting with several other coworkers – all male, except for the one who is teleconferenced in. I hear him loudly making fun of how hostile and nasty he imagines I sounded when I told him to do it himself. Keep in mind I am not this man’s secretary or administrative assistant, and he actually wasted time by being too lazy to look up the information himself, which he knows how to look up and which he was perfectly capable of doing from his own desktop.
Did they point out to him that I was right?
No, they all had a good laugh at my expense because I’m such a difficult person and it is laughable how I expect other people to do their own shit work when I’m NOT THEIR FUCKING SECRETARY. Even though I ended up doing it for him. All because I didn’t acquiesce in a sweet little voice right away when he asked, selflessly interrupting my own work to make things easier on him.
He wants to see some fucking hostility? He’s going to get a face full of hostility now. How can you have a loud laugh at my expense in a room not 15 feet away and think I can’t hear it? Answer – of course they know I can, they just don’t care.
