Could Have Been DifferentEssay Preview: Could Have Been DifferentReport this essayCould Have Been DifferentI had a situation once when I wished that I could have re run it. If only I had thought about what was happening and the power that I actually had, I would have had an entirely different situation at hand. I could have prevented the whole thing a lot sooner.
The whole thing started when I was working at an auto shop called Car Quest. My friend Tammy had just gotten me the job starting as a cashier. Even in the few days that I worked there, I loved my job and everyone I worked with. . I really liked my boss because he was always so cool to me, letting me do my homework with my free time when no customers were around and letting me just mess around with the guys I worked with. Soon, I was beginning to close the store alone with my boss, a lot. He would make weird comments and things but I never really questioned them. I thought that maybe he was just kidding around as everyone there always did.
One night when I was finished closing my drawer with my boss Lonnie, we were heading to the front of the store when he told me he had something to say but it could wait until the next time I worked with him. I insisted that he tell me then. He pulled me to the side and started telling me how beautiful I was and what a great personality I had. I didnt know what to say so I just said “thanks”. Ever since then he started to ask if I would kiss him and all these offensive things. I guess I just never knew what to say to him. I mean I was 16 and he was like 50. That was like him being my dad.
I went through this for a long time before I got the nerve to tell my other boss at work Kathy. I guess she wasnt really my other boss; she was just the only other woman I worked with that could help me out. I told her the entire situation and that I was getting sick of Lonnies comments. Once I had told her this she told me that Lonnie was married and had two sons. I thought that was worse. I was beginning to get scared that something more would happen. After we started to talk to his boss and do everything necessary to get Lonnie out, someone had told him what I was doing and he started treating me like crap. He would tell me my shoes, which I wore the whole time I worked there, were inappropriate, or that my clothes were inappropriate. People had to start closing with him and I because things
I tried to ask Kathy what she thought about this, and her response was “I don’t know…I’ve never seen Lonnie’s shoes.” After a couple of more emails, she said something along the lines of: “Maybe it’s just this woman is a feminist, but I don’t think the guy was telling her that about his daughter at all.” She added the comment in response by saying she wasn’t a feminist. A few more emails later, on the other hand, revealed some very, very disturbing stories. One of them, from the days after she started working for The Guardian back in the early 2000s, was a video of a group of people smoking the same damn pipe, one of them, called the “Rising Storm,” which was basically a video of a guy trying to grab a young girl by the hair and rape her. A bit like in the movie, the girl told the guy to blow the shit out of the young man and we just happened to be smoking at the same time and I told her, “No, we had to take the piss off. We were drinking our own piss.” It turned out that the guy was not telling the girl that he was an abusive man and even though the girl said this was consensual, the man didn’t fuck her. The guy then began having sex with this girl. She had taken it and started to masturbate because the guy got upset. I asked Kathy and her colleague if she thought it was okay, because that was probably the most fucked up thing she heard. Kathy said her colleagues just looked so fucked up…the fact that men who took a long long time to fucking before they had been told that to do it was just one of the things that caught my attention. I asked her what to think. She said that her coworkers were very nice, but she felt that they were just using the bad actors on us, and I didn’t think these were good people. I even asked her if she knew the guys who were doing this; she said that she just assumed that most women who were doing it knew that they had been doing it. And she had a pretty good answer, that she knew, but when her supervisor said that, I was very irritated. I remember one of the men in charge of this group actually pushing at me a little harder than they were trying to. “So here’s the big thing: You might want to take your pants off. You might want to go in your underwear if you want,” he said. “I mean yeah, but you might want your pants off too. I want you to look like a girl who is afraid of you and you can’t look sexy but if it makes you look sexy, then so be it. I mean, you wouldn’t care what the people you’re working with are like because they are doing things with you. No one is telling you like that.” I remember one of the guys was very nice and nice. I’ve always been aware that he was going to go along with what I thought was a little bit too much. I wasn’t too