My phone's battery got depleted this morning. It's also cold enough outside to want to be able to sit somewhere for a while and not be walking around all the time.
I went to a cafe and sat where I could charge my phone. Most of the people haven't tried to harass me; I think there was a male customer who coughed at me a few times and now there's a male employee of this place who coughed at me a few times and has started to walk past me to cough at me some more.
I don't know if he just wants attention, wants me to get upset and cause a scene, wants me to film him and publish the video at my blog, or is just a chauvinist finding amusement while he's supposed to be working.
I got a latte. When it was put in front of me, I didn't drink from the cup for several minutes. I felt self-conscious about being in a place where nobody's eating with plastic cutlery and screaming "Bitch, you got the wrong one" every half hour.
I have much more sympathy for homeless people who behave badly (nobody has a choice about the cutlery or plastic plates in homeless shelters, obviously) than for the people who are corrupted pillars of society. However, I think that there's something to be said for trying to take time to remind myself that life isn't just about misery and to try to keep my social skills from disintegrating.
If there are customer service people at places where I buy things who self-righteously think that I am a welfare mooch who deserves their abuse, they're free to write to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and ask why that agency told me that it didn't think it was "in the public interest" to investigate the totally false accusation that got me fired from a business of which I was an employee off and on for 15 years. There is no job that I have had since 2011 where the conglomerate hasn't caused me to be sexually harassed, verbally abused and lied about every day that I worked.
I didn't quit my last two jobs; I was sexually harassed at them every day, all day, until I was fired for objecting to being abused, and because the conglomerate persecutes everyone who doesn't bully me.
I am not disrespectful of the financial help that I get from the government. I wouldn't need it if the government had never started to participate in socially and professionally torturing and isolating me. Also; no matter how abusive an employee of a place where I've been a customer has ever been, nobody has refused to take the money that he or she thinks I shouldn't be spending where he or she works.
Copyright L. Kochman, November 21, 2015 @ 10:53 a.m.
