This is a man’s world. In it, my office is a Pooh Dat. The one place of peace from their eyes is still full of their shit. It smells so bad. How can their excrement be so foul? Why was someone eating Doritos in here? I was so annoyed, I let them get to me a few times this September. “I am not your friend, I don’t know what your problem is this morning but I’m going to need you to speak with me professionally or not at all,” I said to some guy at work for making a few childish jabs at me one morning. He returned the favor with a verbal assault that mirrored a middle school locker room bully session. Thankful for the perspective awarded by teaching high school for 7 years, I jumped out of my body and saw the scenario for what it was. I told him as I jumped back in, turned, and walked away, “ooooooooooooh, you are soooooooo insecure that you can’t handle me telling you not to talk to me any kind of way.”
“So…that didn’t work.” I thought to myself as I listened to the angry man yelling cruel, and oddly childish, things at me a full 100 yards away. “This will!” I called the foreman, the angry man’s best friend, and asked him, “can you talk to your lil partner before he keeps talking shit and I report him for harassment?” Hindsight is a bitch. I don’t know why I thought that would work. It did not. Then I heard the angry guy, who’s name I don’t even know, talking shit about me about 20 feet away, 10 feet away, then he was in front of me. “This is weird,” I thought before being distracted by something funny from another colleague. Shortly after, I noticed a new kid doing something slightly off that would make us have to double work later, so I asked him to correct it. “Do it the way I told you, I told you to do it that way for a reason.” The angry guy barked at the new kid. 0 to 100. It is a shame how insignificant some events are that make me see blood. Prison is the one, very thin, line that keeps me from becoming a murder in those moments. Prison and Quita.
As soon as I heard his words, the blood pumping through my veins turned to its true magical compound, growing my strength and quickness 10 fold. Cracking sounds pulled a giant tortoise shell from my back. My bones grew to massive versions of themselves with long, sharp spikes protruding from my knuckles and up my arms. All of my senses were heightened, even my eyes, which could only see red, could now see through any being in their gaze. My otherwise calculated yet scattered mind became laser sharp with one focus, kill.
“I can not see him but I can smell him.” I thought, “from here, I could get to his neck in about 45 seconds. Then, approximately 2 minutes until his permanent retirement. Factor in extra time for fending off blows from all of these people around. And then…escape, oh fuck. I’m on a federal base, escape and then a life on the run or in prison…forever, is going to mean a lot of effort…over this guy who’s name I don’t know. Nah fuck it, I’m going to call Quita.”
“Fuck him! Do what you need friend.” After a break from reality and a chat with Quita, I called the foreman back, told him that I’d be making that complaint, and made it. Only after the foreman called me into his truck to try and convince me to not file the complaint. His reasoning was that the guy is his best friend. He couldn’t say that so instead, he threatened that the angry guy would then have to file a complaint on me for the comment that I made to him the other day about how he looked like a stripper.
It’s not my fault that the foreman’s friend happens to be a large man who wears tiny clothes. It is my fault for commenting on it, I guess. So I thought about it and (to the foreman’s dismay) said, “yea that’s fair I shouldn’t have said that.”
“So then you’re not going to file a complaint against my butt buddy?” the foreman asked.
“Yes, I still am.” I corrected.
“But don’t you see, you opened the channel of communication to be like that, so you can’t be mad that he said what he said.” The foreman’s mind was about to be blown.
“With that line of logic, if a lady goes on a date with a guy, then later that night she changes how she’s feeling and doesn’t want to be around him let alone sleep with him, can he still fuck her because she opened the channel of communication to be like that so…she can’t be mad when he does what he does?” I said.
“No, it’s completely different,” he was so mad that he was wrong.
“No, it’s really not. I said that you’re right in that I should not have said what I said. That does not negate that he should not have said the barrage of bullshit that he did. Even if your friend was legitimately confused at the type of banter I enjoy engaging with because of the stripper comment, then why didn’t he respect when I corrected him? Or when you corrected him? If he had stopped at any of those points then I wouldn’t need to write him up. But as it stands, he has not stopped talking shit since this morning and I’m not going to be some perpetual object of his negativity.”
“All because he said, ‘what the fuck is wrong with you, you must not have gotten any last night?'”
“Not really… mostly my problem is with, as I said, his follow up…”
“But what you said was worse.”
“I listened to you, so now can you listen to…”
“Oh so you know better than me?”
“What!?”
“Just get out of my truck if you’re going to talk over me!”
“You’re the one talking over me!”
Unable to save his friend from a write up, the foreman had me changed to another crew. Now I work in a field mostly by myself all day. Little does the foreman know how introverted I really am. That is how, one week after earning a $7 per hour raise, I was relieved of over half of my previous duties and responsibilities. It feels like winning a game that I didn’t know I was playing. They keep trying to play games with me. I keep telling them, I am not your toy.
ALways ONE never ALONE 