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dealing with boys
Wednesday, June 2 1999
Meetings. Under the new project management system at my workplace, everyone seems to spend the bulk of their time in rooms away from their work, talking and strategizing amongst each other. Lucky for me, most of the meetings I attend (with the exception of the utterly-pointless "company meeting") seem to serve a genuine purpose. They also serve as a fascinating social test tube, where I get to see my colleagues thrown together seemingly at random, relentlessly relating to one another. This afternoon I attended a meeting along with Dave and Eric, the two database programmer dudes. The meeting was called by Courtney, the semi-punk-rock girl who co-ordinates our company's relationships with students at various educational institutions. She's a cool chick, one of my favourite colleagues. Today I found myself feeling awfully sorry for her. This was because she was having great difficulty getting the programmer guys to take her seriously. You see, neither Dave nor Eric would say anything with any sincerity. Everything was hammed up and made comic, usually with an a painfully-obvious flirtatious angle. It was a showcase of what feminists have been complaining about all these years: It's very hard for women to be taken seriously in the corporate environment. It's not even that Courtney is especially cute, mind you, it's that she's a girl at all. As programmers, you see, Dave and Eric interact with precious few girls.
Eric is especially insufferable in this department. There's not a trace of subtlety to his adolescent lust for chicks. About the only subject he's willing to discuss besides programming is all the dates he's getting from the online mate-matching service he built for our website.
As compensation for all this perceived brutish behaviour, at today's meeting I tried to be as straight-forward and sincere as possible, contributing only when I had something to say and doing my best to affirm Courtney as an equal deserving of unbiased respect. It's not too hard to come across as dashing and debonaire when you're being mentally compared to Neanderthals.
(It's important for me to state that actually Dave acts this way, that is, jokingly anti-sincere, in most meetings where large differences in perceived company-clout are lacking. But today, in my meeting-exasperation, it was easy to attribute elements of meeting-failure to underlying sexual tensions and/or frustration.)
In the evening, Kim was preparing dinner and, for some reason, something possessed her to eat a garlic clove whole. It turned out to be an especially strong garlic clove, and she immediately regretted what she had done. She went into the bathroom and made sounds like she was dieing, squealing and moaning and sobbing and trying to wretch. The whole apartment rapidly took on the fragrance of salami.
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