Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

18 January 2005

Someone's Touchy

So as not to keep you in suspense about the "formal complaint" that my lazy co-worker filed with my immediate supervisor on Friday, I will post all of the lurid details.

A little background: I have a lot of friends at work. As far as I can tell, most of the people like me. I think this is generally the case with any community into which I am thrust. Most of the women immediately like me because I'm funny (women love to laugh more than anything else) and the men (read, all the straight men) either like me outright because I'm cruel or funny or tall or handsome or they like me because they're afraid. By this I mean: all the women like me and if the men profess that they don't like me, then the women will dislike them or think them un-cosmopolitan or label them "homophobic."

Now, I am very close with three of my co-workers: I eat lunch with these women almost every day. They are all married, all older than me, and are all very, very nice. I wouldn't damage my relationship with a single one of them for a month's pay. Seriously. I forget why I started this long diatribe...

At any rate, I am hardly ever serious when I'm at work. I constantly play the prankster, joke with passersby, and tease the people in the other departments. I even flirt with most of the guys in other departments simply because it amuses me. I call myself alternately shallow, a whore, vain, a genius, a fairy, and brilliantly talented. You get the drift. I am crazy when I am at work. It's motherfucking accounting and if I don't behave insanely I will find myself a lunatic at the end of the day.

So on Thursday I made an off-the-cuff remark about hating straight people which I (naturally) meant with all my heart. I suppose I don't hate them per se, I just resent their social status, their ubiquity, and their absolute huge fucking majority in our political system. My remark to the room, "I hate straight people," contains all of this political reasoning and the emotional weight of my entire life, and it also contains none of it, because in truth, I resent none of my friends and colleagues for being straight people and I love them very much (not as much as I would if they were queer, but...) The point, from which I am clearly drifting, is that it was a joke, easily cubbyholed as a joke by everyone in the office and forgotten by everyone in the office. There was even some funny banter from the Controller, who asked if I disliked her along with all of the other breeders (I told her "no." After all, she's my boss.)

At least I thought my joke was forgotten... my lazy co-worker was either hugely offended by my statement or dislikes me enough to feign being hugely offended by my statement. So she told the office on Friday that she thought I was awfully prejudiced and that if she had said the opposite statement ("I hate fags" ?) we would have all been offended.

Talk about a tempest in a teacup! I was really worried that it was something serious I had done. This is less than nothing. This isn't the least bit offensive to anyone, and I was worrying about nothing at all. The lazy one said that if I said anything like that again she would report me to Human Resources. I guess that's a little scary, but mostly I just think this is really petty of her.

And hey, if you're straight and you're offended that I pretended to hate you for, like, three minutes, feel free to console yourself in the American reality that you can get married and I can't, that your rights and freedoms are not constantly in danger, and that you can walk down a street without fear of being beaten to death by a psychotic homo-hater on a drinking binge.

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