The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
"Don't shit where you eat" is crass but fantastic advice. It's also
an axiom I spent the first decade of my professional life blithely ignoring.
At nearly all of the twenty or so jobs I had from age fourteen (a farmer's
market) to a couple of years ago (various glossy magazines), I was the very pink
of unprofessionalism.
At twenty-two, I made out with my fellow archivist at a research library. At
twenty, I ate grilled woodchuck and drank far too many cans of Budweiser with
the migrant workers on an organic farm in Massachusetts. At sixteen, twenty-three
and twenty-five, I flirted shamelessly with fact-checkers, copy editors and interns
at magazines where I interned or wrote. I never actually had affairs with my coworkers at photo labs in Texas, Montreal and Brooklyn (ages nineteen,
twenty-one, twenty-three) . . . oh, wait, I totally did. My permanent record
shows that I have been, at almost every opportunity, the office slut.
Why? For one thing, I'm extremely efficient. On the farm, I could weed a field
of beets before we piled in the truck to go into town for our lunch break at 11 a.m. At the photo
lab, I could print and sepia-tone a stack of fiber prints before my first iced coffee
melted. I've typed eighty-seven words per minute since junior high. As we efficient
types know, halfway through the afternoon you often get stone-cold bored. And
how better to cope with boredom than to scan the room and fantasize about what
you could do with that tousled new recruit in the break room?
promotion
Affairs at work not only kill time, they are also a particular kind of thrilling.
Years ago, I got deeply involved with a mysterious co-worker a few cubicles away.
We spent the day emailing each other devastating character assassinations of
our cohorts, delighting in the fact that no one in the office even knew we knew
each other, much less that we were an army of two allied against them.
I had a boyfriend, but I didn't think my office crush jeopardized that
relationship. The office guy and I were just new best friends, and besides, I
was flirting with plenty of other people at work too. The office felt totally
separate from the rest of my life. At home, I could be a real person; at work,
I could exude the gleeful impropriety of a busty blonde '50s-comic secretary,
perched cross-legged on her desk, surrounded by balding men.
Right around that time, over dinner one night my aunt told me that my uncle had just
cheated on her with someone he met at work. I became furious on her behalf. How
could Uncle John do such a thing? I thought, in between emails to that guy at
work, whom I was now emailing dozens of times a day. What a jerk.
Somewhere at the height of this work flirtation, my company's human-resources
department sent out a sexual harassment handbook. My office crush and my other
friends at the office — for it took more than one man to stem the tide
of boredom — forwarded choice passages to each other, mocking their stern sincerity.
I'd been all pro- such manuals my freshman year in high school when I discovered
Bikini Kill, but ten years later, I felt like I was so over advice like "Set
boundaries." I thought boundaries were for sissies.
My coworker friends and I found terms like "inappropriate conduct" utterly
hilarious. We riffed on double entendres like "Assert yourself firmly." We
tried to figure out if anyone on our floor did not contribute to a hostile environment
as the book described it. After all, each of us sat next to people who fit this
description: "Mary Sue shares an office with me. When she uses the phone
for personal calls, she uses profanity and an abusive tone." The sexual
harassment handbook was like all those "It'll kill you, you know" anti-smoking
campaigns: futile, because mortal danger is part of the appeal.
We all took the multiple-choice test that came with the online booklet and compared
our appalling scores. It was clear that we'd deliberately flunked, for the test
was a cinch.
Anyone
who considers himself progressive shouldn't feel such things as lust for a boss
or underling, so he pretends he doesn't.
Sample question: "The two types of sexual harassment are: a) "quid
pro quo and hostile environment; b) sexual advances and dirty jokes; c) pro bono
and fairy tales; d) supervisor to employee and employee to employee." (The
right answer was a., but I bet we all put down c.) It reminded me of the gleeful
debauchery and amoral self-righteousness ushered in by those purity tests that
seem to appear in your locker the second you turn fifteen.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, my office crush and I kissed at a bar one night
after work. At first, it didn't even occur to me that I'd completely
fucked up. He didn't seem to have anything to do with anything else. I
acted as if it was all completely normal and I was not, in fact, engaged in a
far-too-close emotional and increasingly physical affair. Then my boyfriend started
asking me just whom I thought I was kidding, and the wall I'd set up between
the two worlds came crashing down.
The week after my boyfriend confronted me, I told the office guy I couldn't
talk to him anymore. Things had gone too far for us to go back to any kind of
normal relationship. His emails turned nasty, calling me mean and a liar. He
accused me of screwing up his life and using him to get my boyfriend to marry
me. I repeatedly burst into tears at my desk, mostly because I couldn't
believe how close I'd come to obliviously pushing away my longtime boyfriend
in the pursuit of someone I'd barely seen outside of the office, someone
I hardly knew at all. And he was right — I was mean. I'd hurt both men just
by failing to set a couple of boundaries that, in retrospect, should have been
obvious.
I now know that this was an utterly predictable trajectory, documented in painfully
precise detail in the important book about at-work affairs called Not Just Friends, written by Ira Glass's mother, Shirley P. Glass. It's one of only two self-help
books I've ever owned. (The other is Alan Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which
I also recommend.) In "Part One: The Slippery
Slope," Glass offers a helpful quiz entitled, "Has Your Friendship Become an Emotional Affair?" That
was an easy question for me to answer. The harder one was this: How did Shirley
Glass get so smart about these things and how did I get so stupid? She outlines,
step-by-step, the self-deluding process by which one becomes infatuated with
a colleague while maintaining a "we're just friends" state of denial. Shirley Glass also says that sex and emotional involvement combine more in modern workplace
affairs than they did in the past. Before, she says, men often had flings at
the office and on business trips, but these were far more likely to be simple
sexual liaisons without an emotional component. Now, with people marrying later
in life and working longer hours in offices that are less hierarchical and far
more co-ed, the workplace has become, as magazine articles tell us incessantly,
the new singles bar.
I don't know about the singles-bar analogy. At no job that I've had were people
openly cruising. If anything, I think the issue is that sexual tension is so
sublimated in our current work culture that it's constantly bubbling up. Anyone
who considers himself progressive shouldn't feel such things as lust for a boss
or underling, so he pretends he doesn't. Meanwhile, he's having vivid daydreams
about doing filthy things on the conference table and making unnecessary trips
to the supply closet so he can walk by the object of his affection's cubicle.
Getting crushes on people you're around for large swaths of the day is inevitable.
And when you work long hours, a kind of alternate reality takes hold. This situation
is compounded by the popular practice of after-work drinks, where one's superego
is muzzled as one's id is let off the leash. Whether as a tension breaker or
what, everyone I know has drinks after work with colleagues and it often leads
to some kind of boundary-less behavior, which leads to morning-after weirdness.
Is it possible to have work-sex etiquette
that doesn't revolve around infantilizing sexual harassment manuals?
At one recent job I had, I wound up at a bar after the Christmas party with a
bizarre assortment of employees, bosses and interns, all fantastically drunk
off of the most deliciously fruity, stealthily potent drinks anyone had ever
had. God only knows what happened after I sobered up and left the bar around
three, but the next few weeks brought — if not a hostile environment, then
a distinctly uncomfortable one. Such socializing just sneaks in around the edges
of what you'd find in a sexual harassment manual.
After my fellow photo archivist ended an affair we were having, he and I had
to continue sitting at desks three feet apart, twenty hours a week. Where we
had once flirted, joked, and played each other mix tapes, we now worked in dead
silence, our backs turned to each other as we cataloged photograph after photograph,
making neat stacks in our white gloves, pressing down a little too hard with
our pencils. We were housed in a small office, but there was so much tension
it radiated throughout the building. One day not long after the breakup, I noticed
our boss standing in the doorway, just watching us. He didn't say anything, but
the next day I was given an assignment in the stacks, and the guy was given a
computer project several floors away.
One friend of mine started sleeping with a substantially younger intern in her
department. She was spotted by a coworker snuggling with him on the street near
their office, earning a reputation as a cradle-robber that she kept until she
quit. Another guy I know passed out on the couch at a work party — thirty
seconds after reaching out and grabbing an editorial assistant's ass in front
of the entire office. Like me, they resorted to the lamest three words to explain their behavior: "It just happened."
I wonder if our ignorance of professional etiquette isn't a generational thing. My twentysomething friends and I are so confident
about how genderless and classless and egalitarian we are that we don't
notice we're stumbling into traps that people in the '50s with their
rigid rules and gender divide avoided with a slew of unspoken codes.
The question is: is it possible to have some kind of agreed-upon work-sex etiquette
that doesn't revolve around infantilizing sexual harassment manuals? I think
there is, and it's this: for God's sake, don't do what I did, what so many of
us do, and ignore all the evidence that the sexual tension is there. Don't do
the most embarrassing thing of all and pretend you have your inappropriate lust
under control, then work late or go out and get a little tipsy at the Christmas
party or on the expense account and "accidentally" take things too
far. Having sex on the conference table is too much fun to do if you don't really mean it.
n°
Nerve consulting editor and Babble editor-in-chief Ada
Calhoun has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor and theater critic at New York magazine, and her softball team's MVP.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
