RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006 From: London, England Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: LillyBoPeep i can see it being lighthearted and funny (excluding the actual whacking; that's idiotic, and i don't imagine you did that where anyone could see you, OP) -- people do joke about kink stuff all the time. =p a group of friends and i went to a restaurant and our waitress was undeniably kinky (she didn't know we were) and was joking with us about it. the others in the kitchen were making whip-cracking jokes. so i don't really have a problem with that. Neither do I - as I said, it's all context, and if everyone’s vocally happy about the situation then that's fine by me. I'm totally non-PC, and laughter helps lighten the load. But one has to be careful that what one person thinks is funny another may be upset by. While it's easy to dismiss others as "too formal" or "too much of a tight-arse", it's important to keep in mind that not everyone shares the same SoH. Too often, especially with established teams, it’s seen as being a newcomer’s task to fit in with a team, with no halfway measures from said team which, as an experienced manager, I don’t feel is quite right. Neither, of course, should one newcomer dictate to a team – it’s a question of finding a balance point. I once worked with a woman who was “on the large side”. Looked damn good on it IMHO, but I discovered later that some of the banter about her weight (which I didn't join in with coz it didn't feel "right" to me ... just a tad too personal) upset her hugely, despite her "taking it in the spirit it was intended" (a phrase that ranks right up there with "now I'm not prejudiced but ..." in the "about to say something the exact opposite of what they just claimed" stakes), and only when she transferred out to another department did she tell people how she felt, only excluding myself and one other lady from her comments. Now sure you can say she was being over-sensitive about fairly harmless remarks, and I don't tread on eggshells around people, but the older I get the more I realise it's so easy to make others unhappy without meaning to, purely through being thoughtless. I've no issue with upsetting people that deserve it; it's just that, when I upset folk, I like it to be a specific decision on my part to do so, if that makes any sense. I'd hate to think some careless, thoughtless, throwaway remark of mine might have made someone needlessly unhappy. That said, I generally call an arsehole an arsehole.
|