Thread by @ENBrown

Inspired by @meta_meg ... How many tweets would it take you to list every job you’ve ever had?

Had a lot of temp jobs in my youth and side hustles in my early adulthood. Have never actually counted until now (and not sure how many tweets this would fill to list them) but I think I’m at 40+ jobs in my lifetime 😶

The only job I ever got fired from was Kmart, at age 18. Not long later, my manager was fired for sexually harassing teen girls. Turns out being awful at customer service saved me!

A few years later, I was similarly awful around rude customers at the mall-store gift wrap section where I worked. But my little old ladies coworkers loved it & just had me be gift wrap bad cop. It was great (I am, incidentally, still really good at gift wrapping if I want to be)

... a year or so later, when I was about 19, my retail boss whipped his dick out at me in the storage room. But I was just like no thanks!, and stole a cool Zippo I’d been eyeing as compensation for the awkwardness, and then worked there for two more school breaks w/out incident

(This thread has taken a weird turn as I go down memory lane, apologies)

I think that about that retail experience a lot whenever sexual harassment conversations come up. I think a lot of people would’ve criticized my nonchalance and condemned my boss. He had 15 years on me. He was also recently divorced, and drunk, and weirdly vulnerable—

—I was a decade plus younger, and his employee. And yet I felt then (and turned out correct, I think) that I had the power in that situation somehow. & that his advance, however ill-considered, wasn’t actually coming from a place of harassment or manipulation, just bad judgement

This isn’t always the case in these sorts of situations, of course! But... idk. In my case, not taking a black-and-white victim-predator-punishment stance turned out to be exactly the right path