Support and advice for a career woman, how the hell do I do it?

DW, my wife, is going through the usual workplace misogyny, that women get. I don’t know how to support, help and advise her, I used to be a senior manager in city financial institutions and the way I deal with workplace male stupidity isn’t the way a woman can.

Dealing with a workplace bully, pity you can’t deal with it like a playground bully.

Well, my wife has encountered her first workplace bully in her new job. He’s, by her description, an old school middle age man, allegedly ex-army, pot bellied with a very “do what I say” attitude. I don’t like men like that, I loath bullies in the first place and the ones with a sense of superiority and entitlement really get to me.

Back when I was a kid, my grandfather taught me that; when they [bullies] use a stick, find a bigger stick. That worked for me for quite sometime. Any fucker who tried it on, I would find after school and hurt, sometimes quite badly. As some regular readers of my twaddle will know, I’m pretty much an empathic psychopath.

So having done some research into workplace bullying it’s pretty evident that there is a disconnect between the reality of a workplace (irrespective of gender dominance) and the theory behind managing bullying. In our politically correct western world, we have this belief that the authorities are there to protect and support us. Well, it’s not the case, it’s reactive rather than proactive and any authority will go to significant lengths to protect their reactionary behaviours, rather than be proactive. If you extend that logical thought a proactive environment is a much more productive one and increased productivity means greater income.

Being proactive requires analysing and assessing a situation before it happens and then using observation to nip it in the bud early. Whilst most of the online information is about assessing, identifying and reporting that you are being bullied that doesn’t help the individual whilst it is going on – you still have to live and suffer it with little in the way of support.

Not good, not good at all. In a conversation with my wife, we discussed her initial interpretation and observation of the man who will become her workplace bully. Once her description was complete, I agreed that this particular man is the Kapo/Camp Guard/ gesetzlichen Ordnung, by that I mean he is using a mid level position to bully, push around, be disrespectful or dominate subordinates or co-workers. Now how can this he dealt with?

There is the legitimate route that you can take, document, record, diarise and report. That takes time. In order to support and help my wife, she needs a secure safe home environment (I hope I provide that), next is the financial support (we don’t have that, I don’t provide any financial support) and lastly the belief that the authorities in the workplace will support her (again my above point covers that).

So how about a radical new departure; I’m tempted to ring my wife’s employers work place and have a pre-emptive strike and inform them that there is unacceptable behaviour in the workplace on my wife’s behalf. Second, is to contact the man in question directly and threaten him in such a way that if he does anything that makes my wife even slightly uncomfortable, he will suffer the direct action consequences of making me unhappy because of his behaviour to my wife.

So there you have it, my new approach to resolving workplace bullying. Does anyone have any thoughts, coments constructive advice?

Suspender Briefs: Why my wife should wear them to work and why my suggestion is dangerous

I love seeing lingerie, I especially love seeing my wife in luxury and high quality lingerie. I naively believe that a woman who wears quality, sensual, luxury or just sexy has a confident body positive image and thus must be at one with herself and is empowered enough to do this for herself.

In my self-centredness, I’ve realised I’m about to put my wife at danger because of my encouragement to be empowered and confident. She has a male colleague who is in his mid forties (I’m late forties), touchy feely and an arrogant entitled bully. He’s a direct report to my wife, yet he’s already made it clear that he’s going his own way and not reporting to a woman. The line manage who my reports to has already shown himself to be spineless and not going to tackle the problems that this man causes. It’s quite evident that he’s a non-gender specific bully as his team are under his cosh, don’t think getting things done or delivered cosh, more kapo or camp guard who is shallowly sadistic.

So my encouragement of my wife to wear the lingerie below is dangerous to her safety as I know this type of guy, they get an idea in their head, have no respect and won’t take no for an answer. Especially given he feels entitled and given that he’s a skinny limber, pot-bellied ruddy-faced (with a teeny mushroom penis – I’ve been in enough gym changing rooms to know what lies beneath). The thing is though in this modern age I cannot point out to a fella like this – respect my wife as a human being or. I will cut your cock and balls off and make you eat them slowly. Yes I know very caveman of me, but sometime you have to out bully the bully. The downside of this is that I’ll be the one in trouble with the law, as the suspicion of misogynistic thought crime isn’t on the statute books. I know how these mindsets work

I know I’m a tiresome old letch, I love looking at women, what they are wearing, their figures and demeanour, but I now it’s morally wrong as it’s quite shallow. For me when I see a woman walking down the street and you can make out suspender straps or they are in a short skirt or in tight yoga pants, I think “good for you” your empowered, confident and self actualised enough to wear this for yourself and know that whilst a percentage of men will be thinking unsavoury thoughts this is for yourself. Basically an inversion of the “short skirt invitation” argument favoured by the defence in sexual assault cases.

I can think of a particular situation where this was pretty evident. I used to work in the city and would often sit Thames side down from St. Magnus church. There’s benches an a little grassed area. In the summer many women would sit their having lunch from where they worked in the surrounding offices. For a tiresome old letch like me it was enjoyable looking at and admiring women (I’d prefer to say people but that would change the tone of this piece). One day I was with a member of my team having lunch on a bench (much like the one I described above). A young woman walked passed us in a grey split skirt and the wind of the Thames caught it and caused a flash of thigh revealing stocking tops and thigh. My co-worker lost the plot at that moment and started saying some very derogatory and derisory comments about her, revealing his own mentality. I took him to task asking.

Me: “Do you really think she’d planned her day and outfit based on the off chance of you being here?”

Him: “she must be a s…”

Me: “Would you say that about your mother or sister?”

Him: “No, but they’d never dress like that”

Me: “Really? Are you sure? Wedding day perhaps! For all you know she’s a mother and a sister”

Him: “look at her she’s gagging for it”

Me: “At lunchtime obviously going somewhere, what the hell is going on in your head?”

Him: (resorting to full on shit) “yeh! but you can tell from looking at them”

Me: “So my wife wears kit like that, so you’ll say that about her?”

Him: (this is where his lack of empathy and social skills shine through) “well she married you”

Me: “Do you want to stop now and consider what you’ve just said? You know me and you know what I can do and am capable of and I’m not adversed to hurting you really badly”

A few weeks earlier we’d been out drinking and a member of my team (Matt, a lovely Australian guy from Sydney but very skinny) staggered into the pub after being assaulted in another pub, I got up took him back (the other fellas followed behind). When I got into the pub I picked up a pool ball and smashed it into the side of the blokes head who had assaulted my team member Matt and stood there saying “Any of you lot fuck with one of my mates and I’ll fuck you all up one by one”. At the time because I was a valued Senior Manager of a city brokerage I knew that the company’s law firm would have my back.

So as much as I’d love to watch my wife dress in the morning, and I want her to feel empowered and confident (and a little sexy) in the way she dresses, it’s wrong of me to potentially put her into a difficult and dangerous situation, because a tool of a man has little social conscience.

Having ranted for a bit, her’s some of the kit I’d love her to wear.

Black And Pink Heart Print Flock Suspender Brief Yours

Fantasie Martina Brazilian Brief Belle Lingerie

Gossard Retroloution Zarlando

LASCIVIOUS Alicia Suspender Skirt Dolci Follie

L’AGENT BY AP Penelope Blush Suspender Brief Dolci Follie

LASCIVIOUS Belle Suspender Briefs Dolic Follie

Delena Open Suspender Knicker Myla

Duchess – Contour Brief – Prima Donna Jolie

So men are the new women, how a misogynist collapsed with a pretend seizure because the woman he was bullying got a better new job

My wife caused a needy self-serving entitled misogynist to have a monster hissy fit and tantrum at work. This man has organised constructive dismissal against my wife and as such, as any sensible person would do under those circumstances, she found herself a better paid, more senior job.

It turns out that Greg, the 43 manbaby, US/Canadian MRA PUA with a taste for teenage women, (he games festivals). Has applied to this particular company  a number of times and never got asked for an interview. DW, my wife got the job with in a week of applying.

Yesterday, he overheard her saying where she was going to and he had a right meltdown. When one of the senior managers saw what he was doing and asked him to stop. He pretended to have a seizure, as Cancer Research UK has quite a number of medical professionals working there, one of them went to check him out and asked him to stop faking the seizure.

This man has made my wife’s working life miserable, in turn its impacted our family life and now the entitled little fool has had his cumuppance. Wonderful, revenge a dish best served cold.

It is a shame that misogyny is getting worse and that these professional incompetents are ruining the workplace for everyone. I’ve encountered this particular sort of man in my career and they make it unpleasant for everyone and unbearable for  women.

The worst thing of all is that they think they are superior for this but actually they are not. I’m no white knight, I’ve screwed around way too much before marriage, and I mostly don’t give a flying fuck about people unless it has an impact on my loved ones (only three, wife and two daughters).

I’d love to give him a hiding, just for the sadistic fun of it. Break him the way he tried to break my wife but she succeeded… hooray

On Password Security

I’m a bit annoyed at phones and passwords. I use a pretty complicated leet and punctuation mark pass phrase. Its a mnemonic of two/three things. But phone keypads are really shite for typing it in. Its pretty painful using the shift and number keys.

Frankly, I’m not sure if letter, number, punctuation marks and a pass phrase mnemonic is all that secure now-a-days. Especially when you can get multi-cored GPU’s, like the Nvidia Tesla k40 its got 2880 cores, mostly running in parallel, write something halfway decent using CUDA and you’ll crack my password in microseconds.

Yet sadly, most applications and most software only use one core of your standard multi-cored desktop. Most people are still using 32bit architecture OS, phones are only now shifting from single core 32bit Architectures, so if you got a laptop a couple of years ago and you’ve just got yourself a new iphone. Then the likelihood is is that your phone is spiffier than your laptop.

In my last job, I had this sack of shit ancient dell, a core2 processor and 2gb of ram. I said one day that I would be fast at coding, if i hooked my nexus up to a monitor and used a bluetooth keyboard.

I was scoffed at by my co-worker, but when I pointed out, that all the code was that we were writing was just text and that it was the compiler on the build server that was doing the magic of turning my high level language code into symbols that could be then executed by an OS that had the right runtime installed. They stopped scoffing.

My phone now is several orders of magnitude better than the Apple 2 and the Commodore 64 that I first wrote code on in 1979. Yes, 35 years ago. Yet still, software developers are confined (in the main) to office desks, and in financial services, still working on old heaps of junk.

That’s why I’m saddened that Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth never got the full backing for the Ubuntu phone, it could have started a workplace revolution, that and decent mobile data plans. The former will happen, but I doubt if the latter will as the mobile telecoms companies will screw people with the pricing and the data caps.