This takes it..
Hot controversy: Fetching coffee for the boss
Nine minutes after receptionist Tamara Klopfenstein complained – for the second time – about getting her bosses coffee, she was fired.
“I don’t expect to serve and wait on you by making and serving you coffee every day,” Klopfenstein e-mailed to her boss at National Sales & Supply L.L.C., of Bensalem.
Manager Jason Shrager told her the issue wasn’t “open for debate.”
Instead, the issue caused a brouhaha in federal court.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller couldn’t resist punning his way through a decision on the deeper issue – whether Klopfenstein’s managers had created a hostile and discriminatory work environment by requiring the receptionist to fetch them coffee.
He wrote that she had no grounds for her complaints of sexual discrimination.
Please pour Judge Schiller decaf before he puns again.
“The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act,” Schiller wrote. The fact that a vice president wrote “looks nice, dresses well,” on notes when she was hired also doesn’t add up to discrimination, the judge wrote.
“While the behavior of plaintiff’s supervisors may have been rude, gauche, or undesirable, their actions do not violate federal or state antidiscrimination laws,” Schiller wrote.
Chick with a Glock fetches me coffee all the time, and not because I ask.
In other words, if people respect one another and work as partners, coffee is no big deal. It’s all in how they are asked.
Yeah, right, snorted Hannah Seligson, author of New Girl on the Job, which came out in paperback in April.
“I think it’s a little precious to say you’ll only get coffee if you are asked in a way that feels good for you,” she said. “There are a million other girls who want your job. The economy is tough. Are you going to jeopardize your job for a cup of coffee?”
Complete story here.
AWB
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She gets the coffee without you asking because you get cranky when you don’t have enough caffeine in your system!
Well as a non-coffee drinker I have found ways around this obstacle in the past. In the most recent one, as a receptionist in a large corporation, I really was not too thrilled with the task of making coffee for the lobby, but I did do it. One time I put double the regular dosage in the decaf pot…..then I accidentally put decaf in the regular pot and of course the day I burned up the coffee pot….
No one really said anything, just coffee was always miraculously made by someone else before I could even get close to it!
I learned early on, a happy boss = a happy work environment.
Lucy,
I really admire your tactful way of eliminating the problem. Care to come over and help me deal with the guys who sell drugs in front of my house. A couple weeks ago I sprayed one of them with the water hose for setting on my retainer wall, but they keep coming back. Maybe I should take your cue and offer them a nice glass of lemonade or some other refreshing drink. By the way, does anybody know what color cyanide is when poured into a liquid?