EthicalDative

Faces. Leonardo.

[Dear Mother,]

There’s a certain amount of internecine feuding going on at my work, nothing directly involving me. Our two computer salespeople, man and woman, do not get along. Her name is D** and he is C**. D** is something of a feminist, originally from upper New York state, married to a Vistron engineer and with no children. She’s in her mid-thirties. C** is a good ole East Texas boy, very gregarious and personable, a hard worker and effective salesman. Came to us from E** Oil Tools, where he had a distinguished record. Even though I call him a good old boy, C** dresses every bit the IBM style, has silver-gray hair, always looks distinguished. I guess C**’s attitude toward professional women is one shared unconsciously by many Texans in mid-forties: respectful, but a little patronizing. For example, I’ve urged him not to call women colleagues “honey,” “sugar,” “dumpling,” etc., to their faces. D** has been in the computer business for several years, whereas C** came into it new less than a year ago. She’s much more reserved than C**, and derides him as just a “talker,” implying that she has the expertise that he doesn’t. On the other hand, he sold more in the half of 1986 that he was active than she sold in all of 1986. So this has brought tension into the workplace, and has caused D**, in my view, to do some maneuvering designed to thwart C**. She has also managed to irritate N**. P**, our owner, has not responded to the complaints of C** and N** energetically enough to satisfy them. At any rate the level of dissension is so much lower in this company than where I’ve worked previously [U of State-Somewhere] that I’m philosophical about it most of the time. I manage to personally get along most of the time with most of the people, and try not to adopt other peoples’ antagonisms as my own.

[Correspondence, Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]