My Pubes, Or Lack Thereof
In an effort to promote team unity and/or express its contempt for my job and all those similar to it, The Company recently moved several of my co-workers into a large shared work area (aka an old conference room). At first this was only inconvenient, since it is hard to talk to S. about the latest celebrity gossip news when your boss is uncomfortably close by, screaming “Fuck” into his phone.
However, after a few days, a weird chemical reaction took place. Instead of fleeing from each other at the first available opportunity (the logical thing to do) we began going to lunch together, drinking together and generally forming an “Us Against Them” mentality, which was nothing new for me except my “us” previously included only myself.
Besides cultivating a strange co-dependence, the quarantine effect also led to an abandonment of all professionalism. Now it is not unheard of to have a Monday morning smile greeted with “What happened? Did you get laid this weekend?” or to have one’s lunch selection of potato chips critiqued due to one’s expanding waistline.
It was all very funny until the day my boss and two co-workers tried to guess whether or not my pubic hair was blonde, decided it was not, then debated whether or not I actually had any pubic hair, eventually decided that I did, and then told me that I should get rid of it.
“CB, come on, this isn’t the seventies! Get with it!”
“Oh my God,” I told them, at a loss for how else to respond. “I am totally calling HR.”
Silence.
“You know,” my boss intoned, “You shouldn’t let anyone hear you say that. That's really bad.”
“Haha.”
“No, seriously. Actually," he continued, “If anyone else heard you, you could probably get fired.”
“Seriously?” CB, this isn't the seventies?!
“Yeah, it promotes a hostile work environment.”
Not that I was actually planning on approaching HR, but if a half-joking suggestion of doing so can get you fired, why do we pay people to work in that department?
