Friends of the Richelieu. A river. A passion.



"Tout cedit pays est fort uny, remply de forests, vignes & noyers. Aucuns Chrestiens n'estoient encores parvenus jusques en cedit lieu, que nous, qui eusmes assez de peine à monter le riviere à la rame. " Samuel de Champlain


"All this region is very level and full of forests, vines and butternut trees. No Christian has ever visited this land and we had all the misery of the world trying to paddle the river upstream." Samuel de Champlain

Thursday, April 19, 2018

The Kiss of Death

During the early 80s, thanks to a job agency, I had found a temporary job that I liked at an international company in downtown Montreal. For a couple of years, when the company needed extra staff at their dispatch center, they would give me a call for me to come in to work.

It was a challenging job where I would meet interesting people. I would answer phone calls from customers needing servicing on their computers and calls from technicians calling in to update their workload schedule. It was a paperless office. Everyting was done on computers.

Sometimes technicians would be called in to work at dispatch, but it was not considered a promotion, far from it. Most temporary dispatchers were women like me, but most of them were younger than I.

At some point, a technician was called in from his work on the road to work with us at dispatch. Of course, he already knew all of us, and made a big show of greeting us all when he came in to work in the morning. And he liked to walk around the room and kiss the ladies while saying good morning. Most of us were too embarassed to say anything at first, saying good morning back, but very soon I feigned being on the phone the moment I saw him come in and would brush him off while talking on the phone when came my turn to be kissed. I noticed some other female employees did not appreciate the special attention he gave them, and soon complained to me when we met in the bathroom.

And so I decided to go see our boss in his office, door closed. When I told him of the embarassing behavior, he assured me that he had not noticed anything, although that was hard to believe because his office had clear glass walls.

Soon after, H.R. called me up in his office and asked me to explain the behavior I found embarassing, and asked me to name the other employees who werer inconvenienced by that behavior.

I finished my employment time that year, and even though my ex-boss asked me to re-apply for the job the year after that, they never re-employed me, although the other younger employees were called back to work in dispatch. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

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