Traveling for work as a sales person means working from coffee shops in between meetings. We were in the neighborhood of Ride Studio Cafe, and we love bikes and coffee, so this spot was a dream come true:
They use locally roasted beans, and a La Marzocco machine, which was not a disappointing combination. The macchiato that I had was stupendously strong, yet still very smooth, a great beverage for sipping. It got me through the rest of the afternoon and a bunch of emails that came in while we were on the road.
There is ample seating on one side of the room, and the other half is decorated with bikes and biking gear. A full rack of biking jerseys and eye wear covered the back wall, and there was even a TV showing one of the latest road bike races.
It's places like these that inspire me to work towards having my own small business, where I can hire my own crew, and maybe build a respectful workplace. Most of my colleagues now are pretty awesome, but there are one or two... No, there's just one bad apple.
I'm not a feminist, or at least I don't think I am, but I do believe in equality. The alpha personality, maybe in combination with the different cultural background and 10+ year age gap, resulted in the use of the term "man talk" this afternoon by this person I work with. This older "man" talked about his experiences with another man (another coworker), and found enlightenment about the whole situation of working in our office setting, which then inspired him to apologize at myself and a colleague (NOTE: he did not ask for apology, he basically forced his apology on us). The apology was for yelling at us, on two separate occasions earlier on, after my colleague and I had provided feedback or raised concerns about his quality of work as well as ethics. This term was then used in the starting sentence of the apology; they were within the first 10 words he said to us.
Accident? Not sure.
Actually, I was so shocked to hear this term being used at that moment, in that small meeting room, that I stopped listening to the rest of his speech. I could not formulate a respectful comment to express my true thoughts and feelings, so what did I do?
I just kept my mouth shut to prevent yelling at this person for his use of these insensitive words. Also, there was no time to get into a further discussion with this "man", since it was the end of the day and I had no energy to waste. Perhaps, this term was used because he did not know what it truly meant.
Perhaps, I will send him a link to the definition tomorrow.
I will let it go now, because there's no point being bothered about this, but it is such a funny story that I just had to blog about it for the Internet and for future reference when I reread this post.
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