I Need to Know Right Away if You Come Across Anything that Smacks of Harassment - Page Three

••• today's entry continues here below •••

And if you fail, you can always get up and go at it again. And again.

If this sounds crazy to you .. then welcome to my world.

» You're Not Following the Formula

I had sent off some trial manuscripts to a handful of publishers, who told me, "Dude, you're not following the formula."

To which I thought, "Uh .. that's the whole point." That's when I knew that I would have to take an unconventional path.

» How Piles of Money Affect the Writing

I also had a shitload of money saved .. because I had been working such big hours for so long .. with no time to spend it.

The writer having lots of money, I have found, is actually a deterrent. A writing deterrent. A deterrent to the writer.

Deterrent might not be the best word here .. because it doesnt actually stop you from writing your best writing .. but you feel me here.

Because piles of cash mean that you dont have to dig deep. You can play it safe. You can take it easy.

It is sort of the difference between an antiseptic environment and blood-n-guts in the mud on a nasty day.

I was telling this to Ariana when discussing the thing that made the difference for Dylan.

» Without Selling Your Soul

On the other hand, the artist doesnt want to sell his soul, either. There is a ditch on both sides of the road of life.

"Moderation in all things," said the ancients. They seem to make a valid point. I bet that Ralph Waldo would agree.

» It Takes Years of Diligent Effort to Develop these Skills

I can feel myself trying to give you a feel for my skill set. I spent much time and energy developing and honing these skills. I read a lot of books on the subject .. took classes.

Every day I am going to work and putting into practice ideas and concepts and paradigms that I am learning about .. through a number of avenues.

Besides taking college classes while working full-time plus .. I also delved deep into the world of personal development. Continuously honing my personal and professional skill set.

You need many diverse skills in order to operate effectively in such an environment .. a radioactive, highly-industrial environment. It takes years of diligent effort to grow and hone these skills.

» The Key to Setting Up Your People for Success

It may be worth mentioning here .. about my peer-level interface .. this guy who said, "No, I'll talk to him myself," ..

.. at the end of the entry titled » When Justice Comes Out Perverted (March 19, 2017) .. I briefly mentioned a discussion of setting-up-your-people-for-success vs setting-them-up-for-failure.

I was talking there in terms of establishing a society that is fair and just and run effectively. (Pretty much the opposite of what we have now.)

» Not Presently Prepared to Tackle this Social Thing

When I mentioned that there, I was thinking about something that this guy had said to me. I didnt want to get into that discussion there .. because it is a big discussion, which I was not prepared to tackle at that time.

I am not even prepared to tackle it right now, either. But I am dropping markers along the way.

And when I know how I want to approach it .. then I will be better prepared and do a better job. A surgical job.

Because I will be ready for it then. Taylor knows what I am talking about here.

There are just so many angles that I can approach it from. I want to pick the best one.

» From a Nuclear-Specific Lesson to a Culture-Wide Application

See .. the things that I learned from my observation is specific to my experience. To my nuclear-grade experience.

But I can see how it can be applied to a wider scope .. to a culture-wide application.

Without delving too deeply into the concept a setting-up a person for success vs setting them up for failure ..

.. if you are sending young, sexually-attractive girls up to Harvey Weinstein's hotel suite .. alone .. then you are not setting them up for success.

Time Magazine's Person of the Year » The Silence Breakers

Speaking of Taylor and situations ripe for sexual harassment .. remind me to mention her appearance on the cover of Time Magazine for the 2017 issue of Person of the Year.

The Silence Breakers. What does that feel like, Tay? That must feel pretty good.

» First One to Step Up onto an Empty Dance Floor

I see Ashley Judd pictured there with you. I hope you said hi for me.

She was a key player in this recent silence-breaking thing. There were other brave women who came before her ..

.. but Ashley seemed to be the one who poked a hole in the dam .. that could not be plugged.

I bet that Jodi and Megan know exactly what I am talking about.

I always respect a little more the first person to step up onto the dance floor .. so to speak.

Because that requires a little extra confidence. A little more resolve. A little more determination.

I bet that Ashley knows exactly what I am talking about here. She is a class act.

» Stumbling Upon Interesting Societal Insights

But this guy, my peer-level interface, had said something to me one time that made a big difference is my approach to management .. particularly in my relationship to my people.

It was like a little thing that made a big difference. And it was definitely for the better. I learned a lesson .. a valuable lesson.

Negotiating the environment between your worker bees and the decision makers at management .. this is tricky thing .. with a shitload of variables to deal with.

And many of these variables you have never seen before. You are dealing with shit that you didnt even know existed .. on a regular basis. (It was weekly there for a while .. where I was dealing with these things. Right around lunchtime.)

» The Weak Tech Who was Struggling

But we had a tech who was struggling. He was a weak tech, as far as skills were concerned.

I mean, he was certainly nice enough. But he was struggling, and he was one of mine.

I had assigned him to pretty much the easiest job there is .. with plenty of good people around him .. to keep him out of trouble.

But this is as far as I am prepared to go with this particular story right now.

» Exploring the Nature & Dimensions of Power & Authority

The problem with sharing this particular insight .. is that it is context-specific .. to a considerable degree.

Which means that I must (first) set the context .. which, in this case, is rather complex.

But, as a start along setting this context .. which involves the exercise of power and authority.

Chew on that for a while and I may return to elaborate a bit more about exactly what I mean here.

» I Learned a Lot of Shit .. Some of It the Hard Way

But part of this context involves me sharing things that make me look stupid.

I mean, I learned many things along the way. Sometimes the hard way. I explored avenues that I should not have explored.

I should also quit my exploration of this particular tangent. For now.

» The Socio-Transition to Supervisor Can be Tricky

But this problem-guy .. the dude who was being a dick to my nuclear-grade dudette, my industrial-grade dudette ..

.. he was actually just a regular knuckle-dragging tech who had been temporarily promoted to a supervisory position for the duration of the refueling outage.

Now, if you do a good job at these temporary positions, then they are more likely to make you a full-blown supervisor .. when such a position opens up. And yes, this guy was motivated. Maybe too motivated.

I actually have a theory about this guy .. but I'm sure that no one would be interested .. in hearing my musings upon socio-psycho-professional insights.

But my intuition tells me that their beef probably had something to do with him wanting to impress upon her that he knew enough to be her boss.

» The Contractor Mindset

As a contractor, you are willing to do pretty much whatever you need to do. Because this is what you do.

The only thing that you really want from your overlords is, "Please dont ask me to do something stupid." .. which can include a vast array of things .. both radioactive and non-radioactive.

And 99 times out of 100, your overlords are good at this .. at not asking you to do something stupid.

But then, again, there is that one rare time. And there always is, you know .. every now-n-then. I can feel myself here .. trying to take you into the contractor mindset.

Because it is an interesting mindset .. where your skill-set does much of the talking for you.

I knew that this girl knew her shit. She was young, but she had been around. I have had weak techs .. but she is not one of them. She can do whatever you need her to do. Just dont be a dick to her.

And she did not take kindly to him being a dick to her. You could see that she was pissed.

My actions said to her » "I will go fix this thing right now. I will not even stop to take a piss. And then I will come find you when I am done and I will tell you exactly the state of things. And then I will inform my boss of everything that just happened. And then I will probably go take that piss."

» Please Spare Me the Psycho-Mindfucks

And she probably wanted to be spared the psycho mind-fucks.

From an insecure male.

Who might be having trouble making the socio-transistion to supervisor.

I bet that Tamara knows exactly what I am talking about here.

This is a great shot of her here.

Which is why I am using it.

I love the shot construction. The composition.

The understated color palette.

The textures. The contrast.

Notice how her dress comes right up against her neck on one side.

But on the other side, it sits way down on her shoulder.

This is the kind of shit that drives a vampire crazy. She might as well install a flashing neon sign there.

Anyway .. where was I? Oh yeah .. the transition to supervisor can certainly be a difficult, tricky transition.

For which there is no real preparation.

See .. a guy like this sucky boss makes you look bad. He degrades the thing that you worked so hard and so long to build.

Even tho he didnt work for me .. I still felt this way. And my house counterpart also seem pained by what I told him that the nuclear dudette had said.

» Let Me Know if You Have Any More Problems with Him

Later, I told the girl what had happened and said, "Let me know if you have any more problems with him."

She never did. So I assumed that the trouble had been resolved.

(I could have easily moved her to a different position or to a different shift.)

These things definitely require a degree of tact and sophistication. And they need to be handled within the proper authority structures.

»This is a Big Fucking Deal

I bet that David Rhodes knows what I am talking about.

Wow. That was impressive. It couldnt have been easy. Actions always speak louder. Kudos and a hat tip.

I can see that David Rhodes needs Jeff Fager to lead by example. But Fager is setting the wrong example. He is doing exactly what women have been complaining about. (Abusing his power.)

He himself is being investigated for abusing his power. His actions say that he obviously doesnt get it. He doesnt get where he is missing it. (Some day he will, but not today.)

If you are good at what you do .. if you are very good, and if you have been working at your job for a number of years, then it is only too easy to get the idea in your head, "This company can't survive without me."

But of course they can.

» I Went Straight from One Boss to the Other

After she told me, I went straight to this guy and told him. I did not even stop to take a piss.

After he told me that he was going to talk to the dude himself, I went straight to my contractor boss and told him what had happened.

I told him the whole story. I left nothing out. I want him to know everything .. in case he gets asked about it.

A few days later my boss told me that he ran into this girl during lunch in the cafeteria and that he made a special point to walk over and greet her and tell her, "Make sure you let us know if you have any more problems with that guy."

» My Sense Coming Away was that She Felt Supported

So my sense here was that this girl felt supported. I bet that Jerika knows exactly what I am talking about.

[ Check out the look here in Jericka's eyes. This is why I captured this particular image of her. What emotions would you ascribe to a person with such a look in their eyes? ]

My pretty, young nuclear dudette knows that I will handle this thing and make sure that the right people are informed and that I know how to get the right gears turning.

She knows that this guy's boss's boss is going to be having a little chit-chat with him.

And she knows that the contract manager has her back, and that he wants to know if she has any more trouble.

I was proud of the way that it was handled.

I can see that it would not have been too terribly difficult to fuck up such a thing.

It is definitely a gnarly thing. You can feel the gnarliness of it right away.

Which is why I dropped everything else right away.

The end. ■

This here is really the end of this theme where I share my experiences dealing with a reported harassment by a girl of her older, male boss.

This next section deals with the drastic ways in which my life changed when I left the nuclear industry. It was a severe change .. culturally speaking.

» Post Script

In my own psycho-writer world of things too strange to utter aloud .. I find it curious .. that I am writing this piece here that takes the reader deep into my nuclear-industrial world ..

.. because it just so happens that .. the previous page I posted is titled » First Days of the Transition to Starving Writer.

Which I posted a few weeks ago, on Oct 5. And the page that you are reading right now represents the place where I was working the day before that transition began.

I was glad to get out of there. My time there was done.

» Wonderful Contrast

These two pages provide a wonderful contrast .. and provide an excellent introduction into that time-warping transition in my life.

It is not an easy thing to describe .. because it was a rather bizarre time in my life. The severity of the bend on the trajectory of my life was most severe.

The cultural distance between the nuclear-industrial world and that of the Lagunatick of Laguna Beach .. this span is vast. My head was spinning for quite some time.

I dont know how Alice felt when she fell into that rabbit hole.

Or how she felt when she suddenly found herself in another world. In a strange world where the rules are very different .. and where things dont always make sense.

But I have a pretty good idea.

Now, I would like to say that I was smart enough to plan it that way .. to contrast one world with the other, side-by-side .. but I wasnt.

The two entries just appeared that way.. seemingly coincidentally. And I said to myself, "Nice work, me."

Me said, "Dude, you're a better writer than you think you are."

I didnt say anything, but my ego was thinking, "He does have a point there."

The only problem was that I got the chronology backwards. I should have wrote about the transition after writing about my nuclear-grade life.

» I Could Not have Possibly Known How Well these Two Topics Would Go Together

I actually do this type of thing quite a bit .. probably more than I notice.

For example, I wrote a 2-page entry titled » What's it Like to Lie with Hollywood's Hottest Starlet?

.. right before I wrote one titled » When Justice Comes Out Perverted (19.March.2017)..

.. where I write directly to Harvey Weinstein .. something I had never done before.

Is that not a trippy thing? Even if you negate the coincidence that it happened to be on his birthday.

(Harvey shares his birthday, by the way, with Albert Speer .. who also claimed to know nothing of atrocities. It's probably just a coincidence.)

I had no clue whatsoever that Harvey was harassing those starlets there in Hollywood.

It's a very weird feeling .. when these types of things happen. It feels bigger than me.

» The Transition to Starving Writer

Anyway .. I am going to have so much fun with that entry .. where I address the transition to a starving writer.

I have not touched it since the initial posting .. which was extracted from another page.

So I may have actually gotten the chronology correct after all. Now that I am done with this entry, this puts me in the right mindset to approach the other.

But I can feel myself, in the back there, trying to determine how I am going to approach it.

It could turn very easily into a black hole of undefinable dimensions and abstract proportions .. from which I might never return. So I want to approach with caution .. from a defensive posture.

Like I might approach a super-hottie singer .. who looks too dangerous for my own good.

This is the end of this page. ■ This theme continues here » Aggressive and Predatory Approaches Toward Young, Sexually-Attractive Women (Nov 21, 2017).

Previous page » Page Two (23 Oct 2017).

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