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[Nabubrush]

Yeah, I think that story is interesting but the email version of it is fuck*ng annoying, and the conclusions drawn also suck. You know what? I have shit to do. Stand on a street corner with your Strad and rock the hell out, and I may walk right by you. Does that mean I need to stop and smell the flowers? No it does not. It only means that day I had shit to do. And quite frankly, if you have an open violin case in front of you, I'm going to hurry right on by most of the time.

[AugustWest]

Shit, $32/hour for busking is pretty good money! 

[Nabubrush]

There's definitely some kind of fallacies in the conclusions being drawn there.

[wombat]

I admire Gene Weingarten's work and he definitely deserved to get a Pulitzer for something, but honestly I find the whole premise of this experiment dubious and even kind of sophomoric. Classical music is an incredibly specialized art. You need to know something about that kind of music to recognize the music is of high quality and that he is better at playing it. It's a very specific cultural thing. Weingarten wants that not to be true - he makes a big deal of the one guy who wasn't a fan of classical music who stopped to listen. But the people who knew what was going on were people educated in classical music.  Why make those other people look bad for not stopping when it's not their fault that they probably went to school after funding for music classes was eliminated? What would happen if we found the greatest acknowledged master of, say, Chinese opera, and repeated the experiment?

[side_show]

The Back Ground:

As I've noted elsewhere I work with a lady who is a bat-shit mess, and the cherry-on-top is that she is super racist.  My mind boggles at this because she is a minority herself and has experienced race-based oppression first hand.  Anyway, she is straight up racist especially of anyone who is an immigrant (or if she perceives them as an immigrant based on race or religion, even if they're not).  When it comes to this gal, if I call her on her bullshit (as I have in the past) there is a shit storm of tears, passive aggressive attempts to guilt me and dealing with hours (and I mean hours) of her arguing with me that will prevent me from doing my work.

The Most Recent Issue:

Recently in the next province over there was a high profile murder trial where as father, son and second wife were found guilty of killing their two daughters and the first wife in what has been labelled a Muslim honour killing.

Recently in my own city, a horrible fire took the life of an entire family except for the father, who was at work at the time. His wife, visiting mother and three daughters  (one being a four month old) died.  Terribly sad tragedy.  And, oh, yeah, not that it has any relation to the story, but the family was Muslim.  All you need to do is glance at the comments section of the article to see the racist garbage that falls from some morons mouths about this.  Needless to say, my office mate is such a moron.

Bat-shit lady keeps asking me if I think this local man killed his family.  From her past (up to week long) performances when I have called her on her shit, I have instead respond to this inquiry with stone-silence.   The thing is, I think it is important to call people on their bullshit when it comes to racism, yet at the same time, doing so is a terrible inconvenience to me and everyone else who shares our office, and it doesn't actually seem to affect any change.  We have different supervisors, and I've brought this to both of them, mine agrees she's totally inappropriate and needs to be dealt with (by her supervisor) and her supervisor says the same, but hasn't taken action because he is not around enough to deal with the aftermath.  So, yeah... I have the green light to come down hard on her, but no one who will deal with her when the shit hits the fan.  Sucks.

[side_show]

But what is the value in all that wasted energy if nothing changes?  My job is keeping kids from being abused, neglected or sexually exploited, and I really feel like it's important work that requires all my effort.

Telling her to shut the fuck up does not work, and there are seven of us crammed into an office meant for three people.  Telling her so makes her shout, weep, talk at everyone or anyone.  If you wont hear out her rant-y, weepy melt down (which is never on topic or rational), she will talk to the whole room, regardless of if people are hard at work or not.  There is no where else to go, and all work grinds to a halt as she makes it impossible to work due to shear volume and emotional timber.  Either someone caves and tries to comfort her (loud histrionics about "at least someone cares", or she goes on the phone and calls anyone and everyone who will listen going all weepy-weep (and I'm not talking quiet on the phone weepy weep here).  And I'm talking through-out the day, for weeks.

Typing this, I've had a revelation.  She is an office troll.  I really do think I need to test the Do Not Feed The Troll method in real life for a while.

[pmcd9]

Asherdan is right, throw her out the window.

[wombat]

Yes, try not feeding the troll. Do you think you can get everyone in the office to agree to ignore her?

Here's a thing to remember from animal training: If you've been reinforcing a behavior with a reward (such as attention) and you stop rewarding it, generally what happens is that the behavior increases in frequency before it stops. So it may get worse before it gets better. Wait it out.

A problem with this approach is the phone calls though - if she can get attention for her rants from elsewhere, it's not enough for you all to ignore her. But surely there is some rule against spending hours on personal calls at work?

[Nabubrush]

You have talked about her before, and it is quite clear you stand up for those who don't have a voice (or aren't present to defend themselves). I tend to have to do a fair bit of that where I work. I think you are the person who linked Yo! Is This Racist? but even if not, dude's point still applies: it is cool and often fun to come down on racist shit like a foul-mouthed ton of bricks, but you have no obligation to call out every instance of it at all times, or else that is all you would do with your life. I'm with you and W on this one. Fuck that stupid racist bitch. You have earned a respite from fighting that particular fight, and the people you help deserve your energy much more than she does (especially as she devours it at an exponential rate).

I am really sorry you have to work in that situation. You are much too good a person to deserve it.

[pmcd9]

Shit, $32/hour for busking is pretty good money! 

I almost made that same point.  Actually it's more because he was only there for 45 min.

[Choop]

christmas time, 2010, the missus and i were in mexico and met some expats at a bar they ran called the soggy peso (great crunchy tacos).

as i'm trading jokes with one of them, he busts out some racist bullshit about the obamas on a plane. it isn't funny in the least.

so i got to use the perfect joke at the perfect time: "what do you call a black man who flies a plane?" he can't think of an answer, and tries to come up with something else racist as a guess. with all the subtle vitriol i can muster, i look him dead in the eye and unsmilingly deliver the correct punchline: "a pilot, you fuck*ng racist." i turned and walked away.

it's one of those moments i wish someone had caught on camera.

[side_show]

My workplace is in the process of unionizing and is in a sort of tepid period of "do nothing" while all the contract stuff is negotiated.  Prior to that we have really been a sort of policy free place, with mostly a model of consensus building, which is mostly good except for situations such as this one.

To add to the layers of crap, this lady was one of the first ten employees of a company that is now close to 500 employees.  That she hasn't risen to any position of power says something (apparently she has always been bat-shit, but it's recently got much worse) however she has tight friendships with the parent organization that until now had decided our board and policy and such.  She had immense power and the ability to get away with being a total idiot.  The tides are turning.  She was one of the only people opposed to unionization for obvious reasons.

It will be much safer to officially address this crap once the union policy is laid out nice an clear.    As for now, no we have no policy for people using work phones and office time to deal with their person shit, and we have no policy for lodging complaints.

As of Friday, her boss is away until March and her bosses' boss is away on bereavement for the next little while.  There is no one around to address these problems, except my poor boss who has no power over the situation.  She has given this lady directions and been out right ignored by her a number of times. 

[Nabubrush]

Union thing can be tricky, but I'm not Canadian.

Choop: I'm going to use that little gem on a regular basis, I'll tell you.

[wombat]

Growing from ten employees to 500 and thinking you can still operate by consensus with no formal rules seems like kind of a bad idea. I mean, that needed to change, like, 450 employees ago.

[side_show]

Well Ash, I hope you're happy.  I didn't share the details of what happened Friday afternoon shortly after my initial post about Bat-shit prior to this, but thanks to your encouragement, I went to my supervisor and share the details below, along with the fact I would be writing up the below incident report to document it.  My supervisor applauded me for both calling bat-shit on her shit and on my initiative to document.  "We need to start building up the documentation on this," she said.

The names have been changed, and for background it helps to know that SNOW Night is an annual event where several agencies and organizations host a special night each winter where sex trade workers are invited to take a night off the streets and given donations, support, aesthetic treatments, counselling and all sorts of great supports in regard to substance abuse treatments and opportunities to exit the sex trade if they wish to.

An incident occurred on the morning of Friday, February 17th 2012 at approximately 11:30am that I wish to report to you.

The incident involved the following staff:  Sally Bat-shit, Jane, Mary and (at a later point) John, as well as myself.

At approximately 11:30am on Friday, I was preparing to leave the office to attend a meeting.  I exited the office to go to the bathroom.  When I returned to get my coat and bag and sign out to leave I noticed Mary and Jane were standing at Sally’s desk, talking boisterously so I approached them to say good-bye as I was leaving for the day.  

As I approached the desk all three ladies were talking all at once.  Mary said (to me) “You’ve got to see this!”  Jane said (to me) “look what she (meaning Sally) gave me!” and Sally said (to Mary and Jane) “Don’t say anything; you’re going to get me in trouble.”  I saw that Jane was holding a donation of women’s underwear that I had given to Sally to bring to the SNOW Night program. Jane indicated that Sally had given her the underwear as a gift because it is Black History Month.  Jane said “I told you not to say anything, now I got caught.”  I said to Sally “why did you give these underwear to Jane?  I gave them to you as a donation for the sex trade workers.”  Jane indicated that she wasn’t aware of this and that if they were intended as a donation for the sex trade workers that she didn’t want to take them and handed them back to Sally.  Sally again said she “got caught,” and “I told you not to say anything,” but then said she had just been joking in giving them to Jane.  Both Mary and Jane looked confused by this.  Jane then took the underwear back and said she would give them to the SNOW Program instead.

I then went to another area of the office to get my coat on.  At the same time the three women continued to talk, although I was not part of the conversation.  At that point, John came into the office and joined their conversation.  Jane again said to him that “she caught me” in reference to myself.  The group then moved to the middle of the office and I rejoined the conversation as I was buttoning my coat to leave.  The conversation was about Black History Month and how Jane didn’t know if she should be insulted or not because Sally gave her cotton underwear.  Jane made reference to how black slaves were forced to pick cotton.  Sally then made a statement that I didn’t hear fully.  It was something racially based about Jane being black “because you’re dark skinned” is all I heard, and whatever Sally said, Jane and John reacted with shock.  Then Mary made a joke which shifted the mood toward the positive.  I wished everyone a good long weekend and said I was glad the underwear were going to women who need them and that I was also glad that we are at a point in history where Jane is free to buy her own underwear whenever she wants to.  Everyone laughed about this, and I left for my meeting.

My concern is that I caught Sally reallocating the donation I had made, which is essentially theft.  If I hadn’t walked in to the above conversation it is my belief that the donation would not have been given to its intended recipients.  I had been very clear to Sally when she solicited donations for SNOW Night earlier in the month that I intended to purchase underwear as a donation to be given to the sex-trade-involved women participating in the event, and had even had a conversation with her about how I felt it was important to a women’s self esteem to have clean, new underwear, and that I was specifically purchasing the underwear as a means of valuing the women participating in the event.  I had stated very clearly that this was important to me based on my values and experiences working in support of sex trade workers in the past.  I had again restated that the donation was intended for this event when I gave her the underwear on February 15th.  Apart from stealing from those who are most in need being ethically unacceptable to me, I also value respect and honesty, and am concerned that both these values were violated by Sally in this incident.