Sexual Harrassment

It's not just for Good-Looking People



I was recently forced to endure a class on Sexual Harrassment. Fortunately, having the mental endurance, fortitude, and determination of a rabid bull moose in season, I was able to resist their attempts to indoctrinate me into their sick, perverse attempts to warp the fabric of my mind. Further. Even now, however many months that it has been since I was so cruelly tortured, I remember little to nothing of the ordeal. I also don't remember what I was doing three months ago Thursday or being born. But hey, when you destroy an entire segment of your brain to blot out bad memories like that, you have to expect some collateral damage. Now... ummm... hmmmmmm... ah yes, that is what is wrong with celebrities.

There are two types of celeb--er, sexual harrassment. The first type is doing something to someone of a sexual nature. This is not to say that the person must be of the sexual nature, nor does it mean the something must be a sexual nature. It just has to be something that someone can interpret or misinterpret as perverse. You can be sitting at the water cooler and someone can walk by and you can be all like, "Hey" and they can go, "Hey" and then you can ask about the local sports team and they can admit a fondness for a particular cartoon and just like that BAM! You've been SEXUALLY HARRASSED. You can never take it back, you're harrassed goods! Both of you will have to wear a neck band marking you as predators from now on. Yes, on top of all the other neck bands and the mark of the beast and that Cher tattoo. Wait a minute, that's no tattoo! The second type is just existing. Just existing is a form of harrassment. You heard me, just existing. Now say it together: Just existing is offensive to someone, and is therefore an offensive act that you must rectify as soon as possible. Here is the "Just Say No to Workplace Harrassment" Pistol. Use it and then clean up after yourself, because a messy workspace is a form of harrassment. I'm not sure which type it is, but it is definitely one of them. The third type of harrassment is putting your hands in someone else's pockets. The fifth type of harrassment, known as "I'll give you something in return for something else, if you know what I mean, 'wink wink'" where the 'wink wink' is accompanied by saucy winking, is the process by which one party performs actions and or duties for a second party deemed by a third party to be "a good time" but by other parties, including but not limited to the fourth party, as something potentially litigious. Always check with the fourth party, as it can sniff out a lawsuit a mile away. This type of harrassment is the worst type of harrassment because it causes movies like "Working Girl" which is a movie starring Harrison Ford and Chewbacca. I can't think of any more movies caused by the fifth type but I am sure they are all bad. As we learned in our workplace harrassment class, just having decency and the common sense of a retarded ground shrew is not enough to prevent slavering overtures the likes of which haven't been seen since the Clinton Whitehouse, or the Clinton yard out in front of the Clinton Whitehouse, or the Clinton back alley after leaving the Clinton Whitehouse. You must also see similarly mentally deficient individuals badly act out common scenarios that crawl to or trudge away from business-based deviancy with the heavy steps of the downtrodden who have been recently harrassed or forced to stop harrassing.

The masterful situations outlined in the workplace harrassment video tape include such popular, award-winning favorites as "Man uncomfortable with woman's presence", "Woman uncomfortable with Presence of Men", and "Myopic Man harrasses Coat Rack". The rest of them were just lousy. There was one where this woman was unhappy that the men in her office, which was apparently in someone's garage, had a calendar featuring women in swimsuits. When she asked why she couldn't have a calendar featuring naked men and how would they all like that, the men were uncomfortable. But then it turned out that everyone was happier with the man calendar, and the "Hunky Beach Hunks" were adopted for good. A chilling example of turnabout being "fair play" and further turnabout being even fairer play, if I ever saw it. What truly sickened and disturbed me was how all those tan lines seemed to be reversed. Then there was the one where a loser was talking to some woman who was obviously many levels above him, not because she was so attractive, but because he was a pinhead with Tourette's Syndrome. He proceeded to harrass her for what seemed like an eternity but was actually five eternities and an epoch, until it almost looked like he had finally gotten the point. Now mind you, everyone watching has already figured out just how out of her league he was. Helen Keller, though deaf, blind, mute, berift of the senses of touch and taste, and also being dead for many years, was attempting to sign, "I can't believe this!! Who is this moron! How has this freak survived this long!" And frankly, dead people have more charisma and intelligence than this guy. And I imagine the dead smell better, too, although we have not yet perfected the difficult physics of transmitting smell particles via magical television waves. But some day you'll be able to smell your favorite celebrities and that one last hole in the depths of your soul will be filled. Or the next to the last one, depending on whether or not you have ever been in a boy band. Because that causes one. At any rate, about the nineteenth time he told her there was something different about her and she rebuffed him, just short of physically cramming his entire body into a business envelope and sending him to human resources, he lit up and cupped his manly bosom, saying in an excited voice, "I've got it, I know what's different about you, you're bigger!" Of course, the woman found that incredibly attractive and swooned as the scenario ended. We were then informed that she was later fired for harrassment. The system works.

The obvious thing you must be asking now is, "How much time is there between these scenarios so that we might properly digest the intricacy of them and have deep, meaningful conversations regarding them amongst ourselves, or with our single self if we are currently watching the video alone in the dark for kicks?" And the answer is shocking in its Machiavellian deviousness. For in between each horribly acted skit, while the human brain is steadily eating its own lobes in self defense, the most apalling of elevator music blares and giant letters spell out "Is It?"("It Is" for the dyslexic) for what seems like yet another eternity but is actually roughly six seconds. This is long enough to realize that the music is numbing the brain and preventing it from sufficiently devouring those all-important memory centers, but not long enough to pause the tape and/or fake a seizure and/or have a real seizure. So you are meant to make profound leaps of enlightenment regarding the fine and delicate subject of workplace manhandling or womanhandling if you have women where you work, but you are required by clever, clearly intentional planning to do so in six seconds, or completely lose the atrocity that was the previous scene in the newfound and even greater abomination that is the first second of the next one.

It may well be that the severe brain damage I suffered as a result of this so-called "informational class" has made me a more charitable, giving person. More likely, however, I have just learned the "do's" and "don'ts" of successful workplace harrassment and, in an ironic twist of fate, at the same time been given the incentive to use and abuse this newfound knowledge. You see, I not only want to harrass people to spread the suffering I have endured in a misguided attempt to lessen the share that I have deep within me like the searing intestinal distress that is a "Bacon" "and" "Jack" "sandwich", I also have the patriotic duty to bring down corporate America through the very same guerilla tactics it uses to subjugate me, the working man or woman, just as the Vietcong were brought low by the Arby's "Bacon 'n' Jack" "sandwich". It is also possible that I have lost the ability to complete analogies and make coherant closing paragraphs. Like a fat man who cannot find out where he left something, it may perhaps just be that this is the case in this instance. But how will we ever know? I don't know.