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My younger sister received an award for being a promising new grad or something in her first year at one of the Big 4 accounting companies. Her prize? A public
by lazyasciiart 7y ago
My younger sister received an award for being a promising new grad or something in her first year at one of the Big 4 accounting companies. Her prize? A public ceremony where a senior manager handed her a copy of 50 Shades of Grey.......
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mabbo 7y ago... had they read the book? Or just heard it was popular? I'm trying to mentally justify how this isn't the craziest, stupidest idea ever.
- 1121redblackgo 7y agoIf I really stretched my imagination, maybe 'She's worked so hard and did so well for our company, maybe she deserves to take a nice vacation, here's the most popular book for women to symbolize that'.
- mc32 7y agoSo ten years ago it would have been “the sisterhood of the traveling pants.”
- protomyth 7y agoYou are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display. Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.
- eli 7y agoIt is very common for abusive people to exploit this attitude and commit acts that are clearly over the line but have some barely plausible innocent explanation. Gaslighting the victim is, perhaps, another intentional part of the abuse. You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.
- corodra 7y agoI didn't know 50 Shades of Grey was erotica until the movie trailers started hitting TV. Most guys had no clue about the book other than thinking it was a straight forward romance book. I could make the same claims against other people about how they can't tell the difference between spam and real emails or ad results and real results. I know because I'm consistently around it and I HAVE to know. It takes a level of maturity to understand that everyone else doesn't know what you may know.
- scotty79 7y agoRomance books are just porn for women. Works for men too but for men it's easier to just look at some pictures.
- eli 7y agoA “straight forward romance book” would still be inappropriate
- corodra 7y agoReally? I gifted romance books before to women. Not publicly, since I've never been in a situation to do so. They've all been happy about it since I always get them something random that they would never pick. Or is it that people really don't gift books? I remember the original book cover to 50 Shades was like a tie or something. It actually looked like a "tasteful" book if you didn't know better. Literally, I would have picked that up for my mom in a similar situation, if she didn't own it already... I'm really thinking you're pushing a bias on the situation. Someone did something potentially nice, but in a lazy ass way. Like getting flowers for someone who is allergic to flowers. The laziness really bit them in the ass. It'd be the same if I told someone I liked horror and they got me Twilight because they heard it was about vampires and werewolves. That's a situation where you laugh your ass off about it and crack a joke.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoFirstly you shouldn't reward significant work achievements with a cheap book. That's tone deaf no matter what the book is. Secondly if you do pick a book, you can at least try to make it relevant to someone's actual professional competence - something useful, but not insultingly peppy. Thirdly if you're going to do that, you can ask them what they want, in a way that indicates you value their competence and opinion. Gifts and rewards are all about social signalling, hierarchies and statements of relative value. The messages are understood whether or not you're aware you're speaking that language. If you get it wrong, it's not just demotivating for the person, it's demotivating for everyone else too. And no, you don't have to be super-serious about it. Jokey gifts are fine, although riskier than something straight. If the culture can take it, they're a good choice. But you have to be very sure that is the culture.
- corodra 7y agoYea, people do this all the time with kids too. They pick up the first thing that's either popular or they see as "child appropriate". It's just laziness. It's not hard to think adults do it to other adults. Especially if they think the whole thing is pointless to begin with.
- mcguire 7y agoSomeone who didn't care about causing a sexual harassment complaint and couldn't be arsed to flip through the book?
- maxxxxx 7y agoThey probably didn’t read it. “Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance “.
- davidwitt415 7y ago'Ignorance of the (social) Law is no excuse.' Regardless of motive, they deserve to be mocked for such a stupid act.
- eli 7y agoWould merit a much stronger response than mockery IMHO.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoReframe that as: The ignorant should be mocked, and you can see why that attitude makes the world a more unpleasant place.
- davidwitt415 7y agoAs opposed to your PoV, which lets people off the hook for their offenses in order to maintain the pretense of pleasantry? Right.
- aidenn0 7y agoThe ignorant in power should be mocked?
- cuddlecake 7y agoCurious. I once read that quote somewhere, but I don't remember where.
- anon9070970 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- scotty79 7y agoRead books? No proper adult does that. We just put them on the shelves.
- DanBC 7y ago> We just put them on the shelves. And we put them back to front, so they look nicer. https://twitter.com/PeteOtway/status/947495792788590594 https://twitter.com/PeteOtway/status/947495792788590594
- athenot 7y agoThis sounds like something straight out of the TV show The Office. Goes to show that reality is often more extreme than fiction.
- Swinx43 7y agoOr House of Lies. That show was way closer to the truth about consulting than most would care to admit.
- todd8 7y agoWTF. I’m sorry I’m flabbergasted.
- oarsinsync 7y agoAt least the book has an air of deniability ("we purchased the current top fiction book for women") I'm unable to think of an explanation for this that isn't terrible: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48348431 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48348431
- bena 7y agoObviously they just walked in to the closest sex shop and purchased the first vibrator in the "best selling" section.
- itronitron 7y agoSomewhere down that path one of the executive admins should have put the brakes on that particular book purchase. The fact that they didn't says something about the company. If she was the only person that received 50 Shades and other people received different books then that is an obvious case of harassment.
- pwodhouse 7y agoSometimes the admins will let a horrible decision be realized because they want the decision makers to face the consequences. Or maybe there's another 50 SoG book that about suits for accountants. Or they confused 50SoG with Lean In, another book about women getting ahead in the corporate world
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago"Fifty Shades of Emacs" I'm not going there.
- duskwuff 7y agoFor the sysadmins, there's always "Savaged by Systemd"...
- pdpi 7y agoOr somebody thought "50 Shades of Grey is a popular book with young women, and it'll show we're cool and modern", and didn't think farther than that. You can definitely make a case for this being harassment of some sort if you _really_ want to see it under that light, but without more context it could easily be an honest mistake.
- Havoc 7y agoAdmins at big 4 do as they’re told unless its against an actual policy for the most part
- mcguire 7y agoEJECT! EJECT! EJECT!