Frisky Reminds Me Of A Past Shame

Today I watched an indie film set in San Francisco called "Frisky." 

It was a delightful film that gently mocked a bunch of California stock characters (artsy faux spiritualists, tech bros, couch surfers, etc.) but the thing that struck me was that the film was made by a company called "Cliff House Productions." 

From the get-go all I could think about was the last time I visited The Cliff House and Sutro Bath ruins- I performed an unscripted, spectacularly embarassing feat of acrobatics.

I went back to my old blog "The Eventual Mexican" and recovered this little chestnut from the event:

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Last Monday, A and I went down to the old Sutro Baths in San Francisco.

What was once a fantastic bathing center housed under glass by the seashore now lies in ruins.

The concrete pools still remain only now they are filled with algae and seagull poop water.

I was trying to show A the ruins when I came upon a sort of concrete ramp. B asked me if I wanted a hand in getting down to the concrete wall that ran between the main pool and the edge of the beach but I only stuck my nose in the air and shooed him away.

On my first step I realized that the concrete was what we in Alabama would call "slick as owl shit." 

I went skiing down on one foot with the other stuck out straight in front of me upon hitting the concrete barrier I was catapulted forward. I struggled to regain my balance with precipitating speed. 

For one sweet moment, I thought I was going to pull it off then I realized that my head had become parallel with my knee caps.

I skidded to a stop with my hands out in front of me and with my legs bent at the knee with my feet in the air. 

My first thought was: Omg, who just saw that?

I turned around and the nice young man was rushing to my aid. He tried to pull me to my feet but I lost balance again and rolled off the concrete wall onto the concrete surface beside it.

I looked to my daughter for support but she was too busy pointing and being doubled up with laughter to notice. 

It's still true that pride goeth before a fall. 

So yeah, I'm still haunted by an event that happened almost a decade ago. But on the bright side, at least I don't use the term "Omg" anymore.

Why I Quit

I found the asshole standing by himself down the last isle in the shop where I work.

I didn't know he was an asshole at that time, just that it looked like he needed help finding something.

So I asked him if he had been helped yet and he said no, of course not, no one at my place of business ever helped him.

I went to help him unload an item he was returning and he immediately started sarcastically commenting on how I was carrying it.

I got out my notebook to write down the product number so I could look the item up and give him a credit when he said, "why don't you put down that notebook and help me get what I need."

At that point an internal conversation had started in my mind- "Did he really just talk to me like that? Am I going to let him get away with it?" And then in the background another voice was saying, "Walk away now."

But I didn't. I watched as he crawled up into the metal shelving where no one is allowed to climb and hung there like a rhesus monkey pawing vaguely at a long piece of weatherboard.

I have helped hundreds of customers carry long, unwieldy pieces of construction material and it's always the same- they get one end, I get the other. We negotiate our way carefully around all the turns and load the item on their vehicle as a team.

But asshole wasn't playing the common sense game.

I took my position on the opposite end of the product and he began addressing me in a voice you would use with someone of limited mental capacity who had worn out your patience.

"What are you doing? That's not how you carry that is it? You grab it in the middle, don't you?"

No, you really don't. But hey, I thought, if I get this thing loaded and paid for I can get rid of this asshole so I'll play along.

While I struggled to pull the boards down and carry and load them onto the top of his truck by myself he continued to hang onto the metal rack and rain down abuse about my carrying skills.

He then handed me an invoice for the returned item but the product code I had written down and the ones on his invoice didn't match. I made the mistake of trying to explain this to him and was subject to more abuse about my abilities to figure things out.

At this point I looked off into middle distance and thought, "I'm about to lose my shit and say something far and away more severe than what is called for here. The job has been fun but no job is worth this sort of treatment."

Instead I turned on my heel and walked off to the nearest computer with his invoice in my hands.

There was another young, male coworker of mine standing beside me then and another customer was standing in front of us when the asshole came over to join us.

He launched into a screed about how useless my place of business was (so why not just fuck off and take his business somewhere else?)

Then he looked at the young man standing next to me and said to the other customer that he was lucky he had ended up with someone who at least looked competent.

Then he said, "My son is 6ft tall and applied for a job here and couldn't get it and yet they hired her and she's struggling to lift two pieces of weatherboard."

(Fun fact: His son applied for a Saturday-only position and then told them he couldn't work most Saturdays because of rugby practice.)

"That's it," I said picking up the invoice and walking away from the counter.

"Aren't you going to finish my order?" the asshole called out after me.

He was clearly surprised that I wasn't going to stand there and let him shit on me.

I walked around the corner to the next isle, found another co-worker, told him I was fed up with being verbally abused by the customer, handed him the invoice and walked away through the main store and up into the safety of the employee break room.

Whilst there I battled with the urge to return to the scene and tell asshole it wasn't my fault that his micropenis didn't work properly and that, of course no one ever wanted to help him because he was a verbally abusive fuckwit.

After some time had passed I went back to work and was approached by the coworker I had given the invoice. He said the customer in question was a known asshole who came in, singled out the young workers and was nasty to them. In all, seven people that day told me about his reputation or personal run ins with him and how they avoided him.

The more rank they had within the company the more they laughed about it like it was a joke and suggested "I should punch him in the face."

The casualness of this type of remark shows how easy it is to dismiss that sort of behavior when you are not likely to lose your livelihood by standing up for yourself.

I sat down with my immediate boss and related what had happened while he wrote down notes and promised to speak to the owner of the company.

I wanted to make a written record of what happened myself so I wrote the following statement:

I wanted to further address the incident that occurred Saturday in the drive through with __________.

The response to it by my co-workers was telling.

One of them told me he was a “known asshole” who specifically targeted the younger workers and was nasty to them. I learned that he had spoken to ___________ in the same way. Another co-worker said he had a similar experience with Mr. ________ and it left him angry and wary of future encounters. A third co-worker told me they avoided a customer because he was mean to them. I have not confirmed that this customer is Mr. _________ but I’m certain it is. A person who works inside the store told me Mr _________ was a known jerk and jokingly said I should have punched him. _____ said he could be “difficult” and ______ said customers like him need assertive handling.

Perhaps the extent of Mr __________ abuse is not fully understood because it has not been documented.

Perhaps the seriousness of his actions has been underestimated because much of the damage done to victims of verbal abuse goes unseen.

In my case, my first instinct was to get as far away from him as possible. His toxic behavior was incessant and there was nothing I could do that would please him and make it stop. I am still amazed I was able to walk away from the exchange without an expletive-laden confrontation. The thought crossed my mind that I would likely lose my job, but I reckoned no job was worth having if it meant dealing with that sort of cruel humiliation. I felt angry for most of the day and distracted from my work. The thought of having to deal with Mr _______ again made me feel physically ill.

This man obviously takes pleasure in belittling the most vulnerable members of the __________ staff. The power imbalance between Mr ___________ and most staff is great. For this reason, those who have been attacked by him are not likely to speak up for themselves.

No one on our team deserves to be spoken to in the way the Mr ___________ has become accustomed to speaking to us. There is no personal hardship in a man’s life that will ever make it acceptable for him to mistreat others in this fashion. I don’t know what reasons Mr __________ might claim for his nastiness and I don’t care. He obviously feels confident that he can come to my place of work, degrade me and my co-workers and then go about his life with zero negative consequences.

I know you and __________ will be considering how best to deal with this situation. As you do, please remember that most bullies are able to get away with their actions because no one ever stands up to them.

The next day I worked all the staff members who hadn't been present when the incident happened came up to me, told me their personal stories with asshole and how much they disliked him.

Not a single person in the entirety of the business had anything nice to say about him.

What's more, they all "knew how he was."

The most disturbing story was from a female manager who told me asshole had been banned from the store for six months after her threw a tow bar at her.

No one seemed to doubt he would be banned for good this time, least of all me.

But that was not to be.

My immediate boss found me and told me he had talked to asshole over the phone and used the old humanizing trick of saying "what if someone had talked to your (insert beloved family member) that way?" And the asshole had apologized. And my boss seemed to think that was good enough and case closed, etc.

Later that day when I was helping a coworker load up an expensive timber order he mentioned that it was for asshole.

"Are you serious?" one of the other guys asked.

"Yeah," he said.

I hocked up some phlegm and spit onto the load. For extra good measure I cursed over it in Spanish.

My coworkers seemed shocked.

"If you hadn't been standing here it would have been something a lot worse" I said.

I stewed for the rest of the day. Finally, in the late evening I picked up my phone and texted my boss. I said since my health and safety were obviously meaningless to the company I was resigning effective immediately.

He wrote back urging me not to leave.

I wrote back saying that one man apologizing to another man for something he said to a woman was some next level sexist bullshit.

I also reminded him as a fellow law scholar that having general knowledge of abusive behavior and doing nothing to prevent it put the company at high risk of liability in the future. (And with asshole, it's just a matter of time.)

I said in addition to the motto that "no job is so important that it can't be done safely" the company should also put up one that read, "no customer is so outrageous that he can't be forgiven after spending a large sum with us."

And so I quit.

I'm taking my burgeoning fork lift skills elsewhere.

I've regained my peace of mind.

I'll be listening out for mention of asshole in the future because he will continue to do what he's always done.

And one fine day, when he goes too far with the wrong person or people, I'll be right there with my law degree and bar membership, ready to volunteer my time in civil court for a worthy cause.