"I hate to do this to you, at the end of the week," said the building security supervisor on the other end of the line, "but I've got two employees here who were found, er, not attending to their duties."
"Meaning what?" I asked. It was 4:48 on a Friday afternoon, and I was ready to go home.
"Meaning SHE was assigned to the security room where she was supposing to be monitoring cameras. HE was assigned to another building, three miles away, but found in the same security room, with HER."
"Geez Louise," I said. "Can you please bring them to my office?"
The two lovebirds arrived. I asked my colleague Susan to sit in with me as HR backup for the socially-awkward (but mercifully brief) meeting.
"You guys," I said, "I think you're both awesome, and you're both going to have wonderful careers. This is the end of this particular job, for both of you - we just can't have people getting it on in the security stations."
"Liz, I swear to you," said the young woman, desperately angling to save her job, "my eyes never left the monitors!"
My HR partner Susan gaped at me. I opened and closed my mouth like a fish. "HONEY," I wanted to scream (but didn't), "your boyfriend has just lost his job. Do you have to impugn his amorous abilities, on top of everything else that's happened to him today?"
The Why Not Here? Why Not Now? couple departed; both of them got new jobs within a few weeks. When I ran down the story to my boss at our next catch-up meeting, he guffawed. "I don't envy you your job!" he said.
"If I made a histogram, showing the reasons for involuntary termination across the company," I told him, "sex at work would come in third, after generally goofing up in the number one spot and theft or integrity issues, second."
"So things like excessive absence, drinking on the job, and conflicts with other employees don't rate?" he asked me. We worked in a mixed manufacturing-office ecosystem. "Sex at work is big," I told him. "You might almost get the idea that sex is a human necessity."
I don't know why people are always aghast to think that other people see work as a reasonable place to get frisky. We spend hours and hours every week at work. Some of us get all of our social interaction there. Sometimes, especially after hours, a quick snuggle-plus in the conference room is a lot more appealing than another hour spent working on God's most boring sales-by-territory report.
I gave a talk about sticky human issues in the workplace at a Bar Association event in Manhattan, and a partner at a law firm talked with me afterwards. "We had security cameras in the stairwells in our building," he said, "but we had to take the cameras out. There was so much sexual activity caught on tape in those stairwells that it was a liability for us to keep the tapes. It was constant - after midnight, associates and partners, bada bing, bada boom."
"The stairwell?" I asked. I tried to picture that. Grey, bumpy industrial rubber flooring, cinder-block walls: yuck! That wouldn't be my idea of a place to get passionate, but that's me. To each his own.
"Look," he said. "Work at a law firm is stressful. People need a little passion, and sometimes the person across the conference table from you at three a.m. looks pretty good, or at least better than the brief you're working on."
We are human, and it's high time we admit it. We're human at home, and we don't stop being human when we go to work. Anti-dating policies notwithstanding, work is a great place to meet a romantic partner. When you work with someone, you get to check him or her out in a setting where you can laugh and be social, but also see how a person's brain works and how he or she deals with other people. That's a heck of a lot better way to gauge a person's spouse potential than in a dimly-lit bar or an ad on a dating website.
I met my husband at work, twenty-five years ago. We got married in 1992 and have five kids ages 11-20 (and this week, a basement full of Boulder floodwater)!
I got sideways glances from my co-workers when my husband and I started having lunch together, because I was the HR manager in our company. We didn't have a policy that addressed the topic of HR managers and other employees eating Manhattan clam chowder and grilled cheese sandwiches together, but people love to talk, so I checked in with my CEO when things started to get serious.
"Oh, I know that guy," said my CEO when I gave him the we're-a-couple news. "He plays shortstop on the company softball team." "That's the guy," I said. My husband assures me that nothing spicy took place in our office, twenty-five years ago, and I believe him: I was a stressed-out workaholic, the very type to say "I never took my eyes off the monitors!" if we'd had the bad judgment to go for the gusto and the bad luck to get caught.
If we were more forgiving of the nature of people to behave like humans - if we made the workplace a little more human every day, the way we're doing ourselves and helping other employers do at Human Workplace - we might have less excitement in the stairwells, because the pent-up need to feel human and escape tedium might not back up quite so high.
We might relax and acknowledge that there's nothing nefarious about workmates being romantically inclined toward one another. We might lay off the "tsk! tsk!"-ing and recall that every one of us came down to earth in approximately the same way, sometimes with an assist from the stairwell. Wouldn't that be very evolved, very businesslike and very human of us?
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