I met my (now) wife at work, the first couple of months I worked there she'd call me at least once a week in the morning complaining that her mouse or keyboard didn't work, and if I'd please come over to have a look. Invariably I'd just crawl under the desk, plug in the mouse/keyboard, and things would work again; she'd go 'oh thanks, must've been the cleaning crew who hit it! I'll try to remember for next time!'. Anyway after a while we started dating and one night after a few beers she confessed that she used to just unplug the mouse or keyboard so that I would have to get on hands and knees to get under the desk, that way she could check out my butt to start her day.
Just thought I'd share my tales of sexual harassment in the workplace, seemed relevant ;)
I had a co-worker who used to stop what she was doing, and blurt some variation of "here, let me help you clean that fingerprint off my monitor" and then proceed to engage in her ritual of cleaning the CRT (this predated LCD monitors). Several other coworkers intentionally would poke the monitor with their fingers (the grease from the side of your nose is great for this), just to get a rise out of her.
The day she pulled her little routine on one of the vice presidents was her last day at the office. She was out of the building before lunch.
Although not really my job, I often helped people with their computers at the office. I learned the hard way to not just dive under a desk to fix the cables if women were working there. After startling one co-worker with a skirt, I learned to announce I was “going under” before doing so. I was young and nerdy and without any bad intentions, so they laughed about it after a couple of seconds, but I recall the embarrassment to this day. Maybe this helps anyone ;)
I intentionally caused a problem like this for a co-worker in 1996.
He was a flamboyant character and had a habit of talking loudly on the phone for an hour or so a day. I modified his mouse driver to give me remote control on demand and installed it when he was away from his computer.
For the next few weeks, I would wait for his daily call and gradually move his mouse as he was trying to use his computer. He was visibly frustrated and eventually caught me when he went on a rampage during his conversation and he caught me laughing.
A coworker once walked around to my side of the desk to see what I was looking at on my screen. It was just some code that I'd written. They were surprised, and said it looked like I was staring at a picture of something truly disgusting.
The worst one for me was the guy who didn’t wash his hands after using the restroom. One day, one of my team members told me about this, and I didn’t believe him, ha ha, so a few days later I’m in the restroom and this guy comes out of a stall and just walks out the door. So about a week later my guy who’d complained about it had some problem with one of our other systems, and who do they send over to help him out? You guessed it - Mr. Doesn’t Wash His Hands. So I watch this guy sit down at my team member’s keyboard and work on some stuff with him, then after he leaves my team member gives me this horrified look and gestures at his keyboard. I straight up just walked over to his cube, unplugged his keyboard and threw it in the trash and told him “Go tell IT you need a new keyboard.”
It was easier to just throw away the keyboard than to have that conversation with someone. What grown adult needs to be told to wash their hands after they use the toilet? I later learned that almost everyone on the floor knew about this guy and they were all sickened being around him.
Most of us were hired consultants in the open office that we shared with her. Management and internal staff sat in private offices, mostly. The instructions from my employer were always to not disrupt the status quo. She was their employee, and it was not up to us to complain about it.
I complained to my employer, who did nothing about it because he thought it was funny.
Yeah, colleagues have happened once, then never again.
I use a Laptop with a Dockingstation for work and take the Laptop home with me every time I leave so I would have noticed if this would have happened.
When home, I always have to lock or my cat would typeeeeeeeeawww
My wife basically made the Office Space joke when it happened, how I had like six half-hour meetings in one day to explain how I screwed up on some arbitrary rule.
We have some cleaners come in and they always constantly rearrange the keyboard, desk monitors etc. Which normally causes a few groans in the morning as everything has been moved. One guy was having a moan about it and I said "You know the women that clean this probably have never used a computer other than maybe their phone?".
This isn't that naughty, just a little subversive.
I used to be the team lead in the tech support department at a company that manufactured high tech products. Our research department where all the super secret new products were developed was anshort walk from our building.
I discovered that there was a meeting room in that building full of super secret, half finished, one of a kind products- and anybody could book the room.
So I booked the room for our weekly team meetings (which were a waste of time anyway). So every week we (a bunch of geeks) got to check out the new stuff, while the other tams talked about customer satisfaction and average hold times (bleh$.
I told my team that although we weren't doing anything wrong, if we asked for permission we'd surely be denied. We never got in trouble, and we had tons of fun. Later on I figured out how we could spend an hour playing games once a week, but that's another story.
My ex boss bought a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches(the loud clicky ones) that would penetrate my noise cancelling headphones and gave everyone in our shared office 'Nam PTSD flashbacks.
Nobody dared to complain to him about that. Still wondering if he did that on purpose to troll us or he was just really indifferent about the others in the office.
Just thought I'd share my tales of sexual harassment in the workplace, seemed relevant ;)
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