how to make friends and influence ppl (without being a creep)

soref we've been over that and I've apologised

fwiw those posts were entirely sincere

I like Feminista Jones's attitude about unwanted compliments. Respond back with "I Know!" But yeah, I am team work is work. Women are not in the workforce to find a husband. Don't patronize a colleague by making small talk about their looks. This is so stupid. If you hit on colleagues at work as a thing, you have terrible judgement and more than likely people have been warned about you.

Some of my friends and I were just talking yesterday about men in cars stopping to ask directions or to ask the time, and then you see they are jacking it or they then ask you an extremely graphic question.

I'm going to pile on a bit (sorry Tracer ilu) and say that 'being a creep' is generally pretty unhelpful framing because it gets people defensive, as it's about them, and they know they're not a creep. 'acting like a creep' or similar moves the focus of what we want to avoid outwards to 'things that your co-workers might find awkward'.

ftr tracer is blameless in my rephrased thread title and has already new culpa'd himself sincerely for the rest

Also gah I have remembered that my previous boss once defended a co-worker who he had just told me had been taking up-skirt shots at the Christmas Party* as "Well, you wouldn't call him a sexist, would you?".

*the party was one of those '20 companies in an enormous hall' businesses, I think it was other people's employees that he was snapping, not that it makes it any better but it explains why he wasn't fired from a cannon.

xp fair enough - you've been solidly otm the rest of this thread.

Yerac that's all valid and all

I think that a decent proportion of the thread has kinda been at pains to note in the most part that "hitting on" is a specific activity separate -not always, not always- to talking to your co-workers about non-work related issues, another subset of which might at times be their cool t-shirt or whatever

Throwing it all back in to a "hitting on" melting pot monolithic heading as if to say there's a strong cohort of ppl itt whooping and stamping their feet for the right to "hit on" colleagues seems a strange reading

Sometimes men in cars jerk off also

ftr I am also on team "don't hit nor hit on your colleagues" and also on team "don't hit on ppl in most contexts" in fact I think team "don't hit on anyone that term seems a toxic one" is a team I could at least warm a bench for

I don’t understand why people taking upskirt photos or jerking off in cars came into it. That has nothing to do with flirting.

but it's hard to know where the boundaries are

Also “hitting on” is a bad, aggressive term. Deems otm. No one should do that.

Lol Noodle

What if flirtation IS hitting on *galaxy brain meme*

The sound of a million coffee cups hitting a million floors

Oh the men jerking off in cars just emphasizes how a seemingly innocent encounter can rapidly escalate.

Another 500 posts on where the boundaries are

Im flabbergasted that ppl don't recognise the penis/divining rod method of navigation itt

Complimenting colleagues (who you have no other relationship with) on their appearance or hygiene or choice of clothing at work is just weird. Don't do it.

Cool shirt

^ this is pretty much always ok to say to someone you are allowed to talk to

Aye, I'm not suggesting that my boss thought that upskirt photos were flirting / compliments - just an example of the extremes of bad framing.

This is only acceptable if it is indeed a cool shirt.

Cool hygiene isnt, I'll give u that

Correct of course to note that disagreements about coolness of shirts etc is another minefield

XP to AF idk tho criticising the framing is more a technical complaint nest pas

shirts with slogans on are tricky because sometimes you can't read them without staring at somebody's chest so probably best avoided at work

also name tags with really small fonts

I mean there are so many variables. Lots of people work with family members, old friends...if you worked at a perfumerie it's fine to constantly tell people they smell nice. If you work in fashion you may discuss appearance. Some people are just choosing to be daft in order to pretend like past behavior may be ok.

i worked somewhere before where people would hug you when you came back from holiday, or i dunno, when you arrived hungover for a 6am shift or something. it prob sounds awful but we all really liked each other. it was a brilliant place to work. it wasn't like hugging was enforced or something, we all just spent a lot of time together in a high-pressure environment, and it was a well-functioning team working in kids' tv, which i guess is fun and nice subject matter.

colleagues can become friends. if the culture of a workplace is good then people complimenting each other can be fairly normal, though personally i'd tend to avoid it. i think "i like your shoes" or whatever is prob fine. but there's a time where a team gets to know each other and a lot of the rules go away, people become comfortable with each other, a few people leave, a few people join, it all resets again. i'd never comment on someone's physical appearance tho - i mean unless we'd become good friends or whatever (which has happened in workplaces, a lot - this thread seems to avoid that possibility - i've worked with people i liked enough to hang out with outside of work)

Team work is work is easy for me, because evidently I am not a human. Work robot.

People don't do cool things at work. Only time was when someone turned up wearing a t-shirt w/the hammer and sickle. One in a million and I was only amused (as I knew he took part in interesting activities when young). Even then I didn't say anything.

i had a colleague who used to whisper "you smell nice" to me, occasionally, in morning meetings - if the genders were reversed it'd be p creepy, but we were good friends and it made me laugh, the absurd delivery of it. i dunno, context too, it was obv meant to be funny and weird.

xpost if the rest of my life was like work i wouldn't have any problems.

something else to consider is a generational divide at work maybe? I'm 30 and have never worked a job for more than 2 years in a row, and most people my age or younger have more precarious work situations and aren't v likely to end up at the same place for long, building up solid work friendships or whatever. in that context the increasingly strict "don't comment on appearance at all ever in any circumstance" line makes sense to me

i think 2 years is quite a long time - i've been really close friends with colleagues in a job i was only in for 18 months. the older i get the more i tend to form friendships at work more quickly, in part due to being more calm about my ability, in part due to recognising the necessity of being friends with colleagues, regardless.

I had a super close relationship with my boss. So same sex complimenting/sharing of tampons/complaining about having to poop, we were both fine with after we had established our working relationship after a period of time.

i think 2 years is quite a long time

again, the *longest* I've worked at the same place. in my line of work, one-year contracts are the norm

Wait theres poop now!

When I've worked in places with a high churn of young staff that's where I've seen the most occurrence and inappropriateness level of interpersonal conduct. I'd tend towards thinking that age rather than length of term is a contributing factor.

Every corporate office I have worked in, people obsess about the bathroom.

I think we have threads tbh so I don't doubt u

the idea of wanting to making friends and (simultaneously) wanting to influence them is nagl tbh

personally i can pick up on this really quickly and i'm sure a lot of people can as well

it kind of makes you look psychotic or like a sociopath

I feel like the 'and' does not serve the simultaneous function but in any case this is merely a well-known phrase and not a parasol under which we all huddle

i mean it's a popular book on how to manipulate employees and customers

That is a certain fact

manipulate = being genuinely interested in people, smiling, remembering their name, being a good listener, talking about things that interest them and making them feel important? despicable.

Back to motive

Maybe a better way to frame the issue is to focus not on a set of behaviors, but on who in the workplace is expected to do the work of risk assessment and bear the consequences for any given office behavior, good or bad? Thinking aloud here, perhaps part of the problem is that men have historically be able to interact with women professionally without needing to spend much time considering the risks of their behavior towards women or worrying about any consequences from it, because that has fallen on the women involved. As a result, men don't see this as work that has to be done, an everyday task, while all the time women in professional spaces have been doing that work.

All social interaction involves mediation, and even the most comprehensive set of guidelines for office behavior will always require interpretation. Both of those things are ongoing labor that needs to be done, and the issue is who in the office is expected to do it. Focusing on an ideal set of guidelines that always lies just beyond the horizon is a way to avoid accepting that the work involved to solve this problem is ongoing, and in the meantime the status quo remains... women are doing most of this work.

In that sense, it's odd that men would demand a comprehensive set of guidelines for such labor before engaging with gender equality, when women have been expected to perform that labor without any guidelines from the moment they entered the workplace. And it isn't like men don't do this labor in other contexts; a lot of them have been managers and understand the work involved in supervising hierarchies and conflicts, or even just navigating complex social spaces they move through outside of work that have rules almost entirely unwritten.

So I guess there are men saying "come up with a set of rules I can follow at work, and I'll do the work of following them" while women are saying "coming up with the rules IS the work, and we would love it if you would at least do that work for your own behavior, especially *before* you decide to act". It's not about finding answers to scenarios that the rules don't cover. It's thinking, before you proceed in such a scenario, "The outcome here is simply not predictable. How will this affect my co-workers? Am I, myself, willing to accept the risk associated with this situation having an unknowable outcome? Will I own the consequences of what happened? Is it better to just shut up right now and avoid creating a lot of hassle for someone? Yeah, it probably is."

otm

So I guess there are men saying "come up with a set of rules I can follow at work, and I'll do the work of following them" while women are saying "coming up with the rules IS the work, and we would love it if you would at least do that work for your own behavior, especially *before* you decide to act".

this is exactly why i found the disingenuousness of the original question extremely off-putting
don't pretend you don't know how to not-harass people and then make me come up with ways a phantom clueless person can avoid harassing their coworkers
thanks f hazel

additionally, if it's about compliments, a compliment is a reflection of what you see and value about the person

A: You do good work
vs
B: Nice shoes

what does person A see? good work
what does person B see? shoes

Was person B wearing nice shoes
Is it one or the other
Is this the only thing you ever say to person B
Has person B done good work today
Is it your role to note person B's good work, if you even know of it

Etc

#teamWorkIsWork #teamLanaDelRay

^^^OTM xpost a couple of people. I have even been telling this to my mother about how she interacts with my very young nieces. Please stop complimenting them on how pretty or cute they are are and start telling them they are smart or said something interesting or funny. There are so many other things to praise people on other than how they look. Everyone knows this but people are lazy in how they interact.