Have You Done Your Sexual Harassment Training Yet?

The bureaucrats finally caught up with me.  When you work for the state, even if you’re a university medical center employee, not a bona fide government worker who puts the phone on voice mail and spends the rest of the day saying “that’s not in my job description”, there are just certain things you have to do.  This year, I was a few weeks late on my tuberculosis skin test.   Apparently a few email reminders later, my negligence caught up with me and triggered a whole mess of trouble because apparently there were a few other things I had failed to accomplish “in a timely manner”, like getting my mask fitting.  For those who have never heard of this, it’s meant to protect us from catching something awful, like Ebola virus.  You go in to Occupational Health and they spray some terrible tasting stuff in your mouth.  Then you rinse.  Then they watch you put a mask on.  Then they spray again.  If you did your mask right, there will be no more awful smell.  Why they think that someone who has been through medical school and is REALLY motivated not to catch a bad disease needs to go through this once a year, I’ll never know.  But my greatest deficiency—the one that they threatened to pull my paycheck over—is that I had not completed my mandatory sexual harassment education.

So I hunkered down after hours one night last week, and got the deed done.  As I have mentioned before, I play by the rules.  When I get a speeding ticket, and have to do my time in traffic school, I do not skip to the end to take the test blind, based on my very foggy memories of my high school driver’s ed class which were clouded even at the time by the handsome football player who sat right in front of me.  Oh no, I read the material and I learn it.  And I don’t cheat on the test.  Well the same thing goes for my sexual harassment education.  Two hours after signing in to the first “module”, I had learned a couple of facts.  Number one:  playing by today’s rules, my best friend would not be married to her Wellesley professor, whom she met when she was an impressionable 20 year old and he was a handsome Brit who had been married twice before.  Number two:  I would not be married to my husband, who was my attending on the wards when I was an impressionable intern.  Never mind that both of these marriages have lasted over thirty years.  I guess we weren’t actually speaking truth to power.  We were speaking sex instead.

Now the idea that I would sexually harass a medical student or a resident is pretty amusing, considering that they are typically the age of my own boys.  I am much more likely to ask them if they ate a good breakfast than if they’d like to go for a drink.  And I certainly don’t begrudge the university trying to prevent lawsuits with huge awards for comely coeds overcome by  biochemistry professors behaving badly.  But I do wonder if the sexual harassment training has really prevented the flirtations and affairs between students and professors that spice up university life.  Not from what I see going on under the cafeteria lunch table, that’s for sure!

I know this little confession might be unseemly at this stage of the game, but sometimes I long for the good old days, when I was the object of much sexual harassment.  The last time I remember hearing any hooting and hollering was on my fiftieth birthday.  For that major milestone, I bought myself a brand new Corvette, torch red, six speed, faster than the speed of light.  I drove it very carefully out of the Quality Chevrolet parking lot, carefully because if you take a down ramp too quickly in that baby you will hear the nose scraping the pavement.  I got to my first stoplight and heard some raucous noise coming from the vehicle stopped next to me.  I turned and looked, and saw the side a big red fire truck.  My eyes floated upward to the occupants, handsome in their firefighting garb. They were wolf whistling away, clapping and cheering and giving me the big thumbs up.  It may have been my little red Corvette they were after, but at that moment, that car was worth every penny I paid for it.  And then some.

Nothing like firemen and a red Corvette to take your mind right off of cancer!