Attack of the Creepy Guy

The worst part of my 1980s temporary employment experiences, and later, of my general corporate experience, was having interactions with the endless permutations of the workplace character I'll call Creepy Guy. He morphs into different shapes and sizes and ages, but in most businesses there's been a version of Creepy Guy to bother me. I've been lucky in my last few freelance positions, and in general I think the hysterical fear of litigation drummed into agitated managers by the mandatory sexual harassment awareness training that's swept across America in the past 15 years has led to a huge improvement. Now Creepy Guy is more often just Inappropriate Guy with No Social Skills, and even he seems to be harder to find.

In my own experience, Creepy Guy has been a gawky 20-year-old who hung out under a staircase so he could look through the slats up my dresses when I walked upstairs to the lunchroom, and who refused to stop peeping even when I confronted him (so I moved my lunch breaks to my car); a Paul Williams look-alike who called the secretaries in his ad agency (including me) "Sweet Buns" and handed out what he said were company-sponsored questionnaires that would help a bra manufacturer make better products if we filled in questions about our breasts and gave them to him to pass along (I read him the riot act and he never spoke to me again); and there was that turtle-like fellow who offered all the young women in the department unwanted neck massages, which always ended up with his hands sliding down toward the unwilling participant's sternum until she pushed him away. Eeeew.

Another time, Creepy Guy was a wholesome-looking guy with a stiff, Mr. Spock-like mien, who would change the direction in which he was walking in order to follow me if I passed anywhere near him, and would follow me into elevators and around the building until I turned and asked him to stop. One day this particular Creepy Guy grabbed my hand while I stood in a nearby cubicle writing a note to someone and quickly brought my hand to his lips and then licked my wedding ring before I could voice my disgust. I reported him; he got a mild reprimand. That same year, Creepy Guy took the form of the guy who asked me to babysit for his kids several times, which I did, happily, thinking we had a nice, easy-going office rapport; once I knew his wife and kids better, he figured it was a good time to invite me to babysit him when his wife was away.

Creepy Guy was once the coworker who stopped sleeping at night because he was convinced aliens would abduct him while he slept unless he worked all night and only slept during daylight hours. He'd be twitchy and irritable during the day, and hopped up on coffee and huge helpings of sweet desserts consumed in front of his computer throughout the night. Creepy Guy also took the form of the guy who recommended a religious cult with a sexual emphasis to me, and who offered to give me personal instruction. There was the other time when Creepy Guy was a Yukio Mishima fanatic and martial arts devotee who owned every book and movie related to Mishima's life or writings, and was eager to share them with me and tell me why Mishima's blend of S&M, fascism, and poetry was a beautiful mix. He rather scared me.

Sometimes Creepy Guy's a nervous, shy, little guy; sometimes he's tall and menacing, like the coworker who had frenzied outbursts complete with flailing arms and flying spit as he hurled loud sentences full of obscene invective at me when he didn't think one of the articles I edited for a newsletter was sufficiently edifying. He made it clear that he thought my work, and by extension I, was a form of time- and space-wasting excrement because I wouldn't alter the article to include a sentence vilifying a coworker with whom he'd had a tiff.

The Creepy Guy who sneaked into my cubicle after hours and read and commented on reminders I had written to myself on Post-It notes by affixing other, smaller Post-It notes with his own observations to my private notes, was the same Creepy Guy who accused me of wearing too much perfume on days when I wore none. The only Creepy Gal I can think of with whom I've worked could have used that perfume; her body odor was so extreme it could be detected from three cubicles away. Honestly. She had a voice like a drunken, belligerent Greta Van Susteren crossed with a moaning Janis Joplin, even at 11 o'clock in the morning, when she finally bothered to show up at work: it was whinging and nasal and loud. At least Janis Joplin had an excuse: kick-ass blues pipes. And Janis was down-to-earth and nice to my dad when she bought a sandwich from him at the San Francisco deli at which he worked in the 1960s. But that's another story.

Creepy Gal was clueless, yes, but not the walking, twitchy, screaming invitation to HR to intervene and set boundaries that the Creepy Guys were. Not that HR ever did intervene in any of those cases, even when notified. I think now they would in a heartbeat, but in the 1980s and 1990s, even at places like Apple Computer that had a more open-minded, modern, progressive world view, there was still way too much tolerance of that kind of numbing, disrespectful, humiliating garbage around. When I read or hear (mostly young) women say that feminism's dated and unnecessary, I want to take them back in time to see what women used to have to go through before feminists started holding society accountable for the way we treat women. And most people weren't as willing to stand up, complain, shove back, and stand their ground as I was, because they feared losing their jobs more than I did and didn't want to be seen as being pushy, difficult feminists. But my pushing back and speaking up always seemed to surprise these guys, partly because I'm sure they'd always gotten away with it before, but partly because they didn't expect a short, perky, friendly chick in girly clothes who brought homemade cookies to meetings to have a spine and fight back when dissed. Joke's on them.