Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for January 03, 2025

Serious topic here: At what point does asking for a date become sexual harassment? I worked in a Government office and we had frequent sexual harassment prevention training sessions, so I thought I was pretty savvy about the subject (generally it’s common sense). Basically in Herbie’s case, it would have to fall into the category of REPEATED unwanted attention (not taking “no” as meaning “no”). However I later had a supervisor (unmarried woman, not sure how relevant that is) who said it meant zero tolerance for ANY unwanted attention, so, if a guy asked the woman for a date just once and she didn’t wasn’t interested, that constituted sexual harassment. I’m glad I was always married during my career!

I might add that I (m, 72) never saw obvious sexual harassment in the workplace from co-workers, however where it did take place was from members of the public, and was often very obvious, even to me. However management never seemed to be sympathetic to it, and that was an underlying problem (there are always going to be jerks and criminals, but how the “authorities” respond is what we can do something about).