Generation-X culture vs Boomer culture

[Trevor]

I admit, I knew this stuff happened, but I never imagined it was so extensive. I guess ultimately what it comes down to is power and influence; that is their top priority.

What I hate hearing is how all men are thugs, brutes, abusers, idiots, and so on. There are people who have grown up today hearing nothing else, meaning that their worldview has been poisoned from day one. It's actually pretty sad, but it's not going to be easy to reverse.

[Higgenbotham]

I'll tell you the toughest thing I had to go through personally at that company. The facility employed about 50 management and 350 non-management. When I started there, I was asked if I played basketball. Soon I learned that the management had 4 or 5 star high school and college basketball players. Within a couple months I learned further that there was an annual management vs employee basketball game where there were two teams of each. All management was required to participate.

The idea was that the management A team was going to wallop the employees because they had these star players but the employees would make it up with the B team. So we have a few hundred people packed into this basketball stadium playing full court basketball and I have no idea how to play basketball but am required to play. And if you look at me you would say this guy really should know how to play basketball. I just prayed to God I could look like I knew what I was doing and score two points right away because the idea here was to make the B team look like doofuses so the employees would win that game.

So on like the second drive down, bang, I scored my basket and the Plant Manager pulled me out. I was never so relieved in my life. I could have literally been out there all afternoon making a total ass of myself. Luckily, those star basketball players were all promoted and transferred and that torture came to an end.

[Higgenbotham]

I would add it was 1984 when I started with this company. The economy was still iffy coming out of the recession and there were plenty of job applicants. The company did a rotation every 6 months and fired one or two out of the 30 or so of us on the first line. Everything counted because they were looking for potential leaders. My dad (a Silent) told me if I failed I was not welcome back home. I saved money like crazy. That first year I was scared absolutely shitless.

As mentioned before, having grown up in the Dust Bowl on a farm with an outhouse and no indoor plumbing, I don't think my dad found his demand unreasonable. In his view, having a kid in his early 20s coming home a failure could help take a whole household down if things didn't get better. You don't work, you don't eat in other words. Today's parents don't understand this concept.

[JR_in_Mass]

John said,

I think it's worth remembering the enormous hostility in the workplace
in the 1990s, following the Anita Hill / Clarence Thomas debacle.
Hill had worked for Thomas ten years earlier, at a time when
neither of them was married. Thomas asked her out a couple of
times and told her some off-color jokes, but all the while promoting
her and giving more responsibility and more money.

That's not what Clarence Thomas says. From testimony 10/11/91 (found at http://www.annoy.com/sectionless/doc.ht ... tID=100506):

Contrary to some press reports, I categorically denied all of the allegations and denied that I ever attempted to date Anita Hill, when first interviewed by the FBI. I strongly reaffirm that denial.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you have anything you would like to say?

Judge THOMAS. Senator, I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically that I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill, that I ever attempted to date her, that I ever had any personal sexual interest in her . . .

I've worked in mix-sex environments at many jobs, including at a well-known women's college full of radical feminists and attractive undergraduates, and have never had any problem such as described in this forum.

[CrosstimbersOkie]

I've worked in mix-sex environments at many jobs, including at a well-known women's college full of radical feminists and attractive undergraduates, and have never had any problem such as described in this forum.

Me neither. I think it all boils down to how you carry yourself in an environment that allows this BS to go on. But, this kind of behavior is too easy to quash, especially in theses days of digital cameras. If the female wants to act like a streetwalker, help her drop her pretenses at being something different. Kick her to the street and let her walk.

[Higgenbotham]

I've worked in mix-sex environments at many jobs, including at a well-known women's college full of radical feminists and attractive undergraduates, and have never had any problem such as described in this forum.

Me neither. I think it all boils down to how you carry yourself in an environment that allows this BS to go on. But, this kind of behavior is too easy to quash, especially in theses days of digital cameras. If the female wants to act like a streetwalker, help her drop her pretenses at being something different. Kick her to the street and let her walk.

In the office where the Boomer pulled the "Reverse Rapo" there was a middle aged Boomer soccer mom across the hall from me. We were pretty friendly but she knew nothing about the story I related. There was a married guy in the office who was about 52 and he was having an affair with a single woman who was about 25. This went on for maybe 2 years before it became generally known. The reason I knew about it was because the 52 year old's drinking buddy in the office was a good friend and he told me. When the soccer mom found out about the affair, she asked me if I knew about it. I said, yeah, I've known about it for 2 years. She said why didn't you tell me. I said because you didn't need to know. There were a lot of other things going on in that office that she didn't know about. One day, the 52 year old guy called me and said, hey, I found this website that has criminal records. He had found out there was an engineer in our office who had been convicted at one time for receiving stolen property, among other things, and had a rap sheet with several serious charges on it and had spent time in prison. Another engineer in our office had been arrested on a rape charge which got reduced. These were records on the state circuit courts website and I saw them. She didn't know any of that either and I didn't tell her. I became close with the 52 year old guy in later years. One day, I asked him why he had those serial affairs with the young women in the office (there were several, one right after the other, all Xers). He said it was because of the stress he had been placed under and when he transferred out the affairs and the drinking completely stopped cold turkey. I asked him who instigated the affairs and he said the Xer women did and told me the details. The details sounded believable based on what I knew about these women (they were bad news). His wife was aware of all of it and stood by him. She was a very nice woman. The stress from the job gave him acid reflux and caused his esophagus to deform (Barrett's disease) but he's retired now and his life is completely normal. He's now 67, which I guess makes him an early Boomer.

I'll cover a couple other representatve things I encountered in that office and a different office after that when I get time.

[Higgenbotham]

This story might be called a nice Xer girl survives the third turning.

I met "Jen" in the office desribed above. She was 27 and hadn't worked there too long. She had a BS in engineering from a top school and was bright, beautiful, sweet, well mannered, and very shy. She met and married her husband right out of school and he was the only man she ever dated. She told me how they met and about their early years. He was an engineer in a nuclear power plant.

The men made a steady stream to her office to flirt with her and tell her how nice she looked. I asked her why she worked there. She said it was because when she went to parties at her husband's work there were two groups of women, women who would talk about their careers and women who would talk about their kids. She hadn't been able to get pregnant and didn't fit into either group so she decided to go to work even though she didn't really want to.

It wasn't too long, maybe a year, before "Jen" started asking me to go out to lunch with her on a regular basis. She was very nervous the first time she asked me. We went to everything from pizza joints to the finest restaurants in the city. Nobody in the office said anything about it. The men stopped visiting her cubicle. This went on for 3 or 4 years. Every year, I got a birthday card and a Christmas card from her that she would put into my work mailbox. I never gave her anything. There was never any physical contact.

During that time, her husband quit the nuclear power plant, went back to school and found a different job. I moved to a different office but we continued to meet whenever we could. One day we met and she was spitting mad at her boss. This wasn't normal. She also had a rash on her face that came out of the corner of her eye. I said, "Jen", are you pregnant? She said yes, I am! I said how far along and she said 3 or 4 months. She said don't tell anybody, and in a few months I'm leaving. Nobody else figured it out and 3 or 4 months later, she resigned. I went to her going away party. I never saw or heard from her again.

[John]

> Contrary to some press reports, I categorically denied all of the
> allegations and denied that I ever attempted to date Anita Hill,
> when first interviewed by the FBI. I strongly reaffirm that
> denial.

> http://www.annoy.com/sectionless/doc.ht ... tID=100506

Thanks for pointing that out. But he would have to say that whether
the accusations were true or not. My point is that the accusations
were completely trivial, whether or not true.

> I've worked in mix-sex environments at many jobs, including at a
> well-known women's college full of radical feminists and
> attractive undergraduates, and have never had any problem such as
> described in this forum.

> Me neither. I think it all boils down to how you carry yourself in
> an environment that allows this BS to go on.

Pride goeth before the fall.

John

[Trevor]

If it hasn't happened, it's natural to think that it can't. I used to think it was all a bunch of BS. Hopefully, you won't find out because I can tell you, it's not a pleasant experience.

[Higgenbotham]

Lastly, this occurred in the office I moved to from the office "Jen" was in. I will tell this through the eyes of a Thai American guy I was training. There were 4 departments in this office building, all on different wings of the building. There was a courtyard out back.

Some of the Xer women from a different wing started smoking out in the courtyard. Pretty soon they set up a picnic table in front of my cubicle, which viewed the courtyard. There were two rows of offices in the building that viewed the courtyard. The women would strike various poses and grin at me from time to time. I was probably 38 at the time and the women may have been 10 years younger. The Thai guy liked to come down to my cubicle to watch this show. Our female Xer office manager noticed and commented, asking me if I liked the view from my office. I said yeah, it's not bad. So one day the Thai guy pointed and excitedly yelled, look at that! By the time I looked, the Xer woman still had her hands on her shirt, which was back down and she was grinning like a Cheshire cat. I said to the Thai guy, what happened? He said she flashed her bare tits! He was really shocked because he was first generation and couldn't imagine that what he just saw was really happening.

Next, from another wing, there was another girl, also an Xer, the Thai guy met and brought into our office. She was a fox. It turned out she had embezzled money from a bank and was in a structured living arrangement, and that office had hired her to work until she went back to normal living. We took her out into the courtyard and tossed a frisbee during one of our breaks. There was a garage in back of our office that was accessible, but rarely used. She spotted that right away and suggested we go in there and have sex. I ignored that, but decided to go to her going away party before they turned her loose back into the real world.

I could fill another 16 pages with this stuff but eventually it all reads kind of the same.