Wedding Weight

Chapter 8 - The Thing About Failure

Julia had years of experience leading sexual harassment seminars, so she knew what to expect. Most employees just wanted the whole tedious affair to be over as quickly as possible, so they sat silently on their molded plastic chairs, chewing their complimentary pastries and letting Julia's words wash over them with bovine indifference.

But there was always at least one employee who was galled by the stifling rules of workplace conduct and turned confrontational. These wannabe Constitutional scholars would proffer impassioned but dubious legal arguments about how they had a First Amendment right to compliment a co-worker's tits. Or at least look at them for God's sake, without worrying about a lawsuit. This was still America, after all.

So Julia was prepared for that. She wasn't prepared, however, for someone to stand up and drop his pants.

He was a newly hired Sales Associate and Julia couldn't imagine what the Manager of the Santa Monica store was thinking when she hired this dipshit. In his early twenties, he had a vintage Bazooka Joe T-shirt, Curt Cobain hair and the screamingly affected name of Galen. Julia would have bet any amount of money that he was in a band. And she would have gone double-or-nothing that the band sucked.

When he came into the conference room, ten minutes late, Julia had already begun her PowerPoint presentation. But rather than politely slinking into an open seat off to the side, he loudly pushed past knees and stepped on feet to get to a seat in the center of the third row, where he stage-whispered to another employee, "I hear this is a great place to meet chicks!"

In response to virtually everything Julia said, Galen had a wisecrack. When Julia explained that for a behavior to qualify as harassment, it has to be "unwelcome," Galen said, "So it's OK to grab your ass or whatever as long as you're cool with it?"

Julia refused to rise to the bait and calmly explained that, yes, he was technically correct. But it still wasn't a smart idea.

"But what about those chicks who are, like, super-uptight or whatever and are offended by freakin' everything? Can't they just sue for, like, whatever?"

At which point Julia patiently explained the "reasonable woman" standard in determining what constitutes harassment. To which Galen quipped, "Reasonable woman? Isn't that, like, a contradiction in terms or whatever?"

"No, it's not," said Julia, through a tight smile. Galen grinned back. He had gotten to her, and he knew it.

Julia soldiered on for another hour, parrying Galen's arguments and sidestepping his provocations. Until finally, mercifully, she reached the last PowerPoint slide: Q&A.

"Does anyone have any questions?" she asked.

"Yeah," said Galen, rising to his feet. She sighed inwardly. "Is this..." He let his his pants fall to his ankles. "...sexual harassment?"

This took Julia, and everybody else, by surprise. There was some scattered snickering, but mostly people sat tensely, waiting to see how Julia was going to handle this.

She didn't have long to decide what to say in response to this flagrant defiance of her authority. A threat? Cutting sarcasm? Both of those things were warranted, but they would just be throwing fuel on the fire.

Instead, she just grinned at him with wry amusement and then pointedly turned her attention elsewhere. "Anybody else?" she nonchalantly asked to the group. And the room laughed appreciatively.

Galen suddenly felt very foolish. Originally, he was the rebellious student, refusing to be cowed by the overbearing teacher. But now, he was just some fucking idiot, standing there with his pants around his ankles in the middle of a conference room.