It'll be hard to repair a relationship that's been spinning ever downward for months. This morning was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Fred, Patti and I were sitting around talking about hurricanes. Fred, who's really into weather, was explaining how they form, about pressure and all that, very technical. When he finished, I said, "That's really interesting. Now say it again so Patti can understand." It was pretty typical and pretty tame compared to some of the things I'd said to her.
Patti had already figured out that she bore the brunt of my frustration with my job, and that my sheer dislike of her was secondary to that. Obviously, nobody in my real life would ever hang with me if I treated them this way. But even setting that aside, I think the job partly created the situation.

After film school and lofty, vague hopes of a career in the arts, I was ill-suited to the demands of a lowly clerical position. Basically, I was an asshole in a job requiring

The job was mindless, and so were some of the people I had to deal with. I got along with Fred and Hope, and found an easy rapport with Mary Ann, but could barely tolerate Patti. From the beginning, one of the things that annoyed me most about Patti was her infantilism. She literally cooed at people, giggling at everything, said every phrase with a sing-song. That's just how she is. She thinks others are amused by it, I guess. Fine. She gets along with people, and they seem to like her.
Something about her softness, her childishness, set me off every time. Maybe it underscored the gap between the job (fit for a high school student or a trained monkey) and my own encroaching adulthood-- squandered here scanning barcodes with a fucking laser wand.

So I reacted by putting her down. One day, months ago, I was waiting for Patti to finish using a computer I needed. She called out, "I'm doooooone!" in a babyish voice, and I replied "So what do you want me to do, wipe you?"

It's a matter of style. I say what I think. Even when I don't know what I'm talking about, I'll take off that implied question mark at the end of a sentence and dare to be exposed as a fraud. Beyond that, I couldn't square Patti's style with the fact that in my eyes, she had a better job than me. I figured if she can be funny, I can be funny in my own, antithetical way. When she said, "I'm doooooone!" I felt I was matching joke for joke.

Another example came back to haunt me during the meeting. A few months earlier, Fred was drinking his usual Dr. Pepper at lunch and he made a loud slurping sound when he took his lips off the bottle. He said, "What did that sound like?" and I replied, "You know when you take your dick out and and there's air trapped..."I was so pleased with the way Fred laughed at my joke that I didn't notice Patti's reaction. (I found out later she'd been mortified.)

In my opinion, there wasn't a directly sexual aspect to our interaction. I never pursued her, never tried to get anything from her, never commented on her body. I was goading her, relishing the air of antagonism that arose from pointing out our differences. I figured my opinion was roughly as irrelevant to her as hers was to me, so why not entertain ourselves?


But in the HR office, as this was all being played back to me, I realized that I never "sexually harassed" Patti when Fred wasn't there. He was an appreciative audience and, I suppose, that legitimated my behavior. We acted like two unruly boys. Part of what Patti complained about to Danielle was our tendency to comment about women who came into the office from other departments. We'd make these remarks to each other, and never to Patti, but they were still inappropriate. (This, I find out, is termed "situational harassment.")

If I'd known the effect my quips were having, I'd have kept my mouth shut, maybe even tried to act friendly toward her. But at the same time, these questions arose in my mind: If she were a man, would she have been less likely to take shit from me? Would I have dished it out like I did? Would a man bottle it up for a year? Would a man go over my head?

I should have understood on my own (but needed Danielle to explain), that for Patti, filing a complaint was the one possible course of action. Talking to me frankly without feeling challenged or ridiculed must have seemed impossible.

After all, it wasn't just the "wipe" comment, the Dr. Pepper bottle and the hurricane;