GolfHos

Whack Off While You Work
My co-worker pleasures himself at the office, and HR doesn't care.
Posted Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009, at 6:39 AM ET

Dear Prudence,
I work in an office that I share with two other people. The desks are in a triangle with short partitions between us, but it is possible to see one another through the gaps. One co-worker is part-time, so I am frequently alone with the third. Lately, I have been hearing and then seeing him participating in a solo activity usually done in the bedroom. Once I figured out for sure what he was doing, I went to human resources. The manager told me that as she has only my word about this, I should go find her when he does it again so she can know for herself. The problem is, she is never around when it happens. He stops if I get up to go out the door and starts when I sit down again. I feel violated, abused, and totally grossed out. What should I do?

—Nauseated

Dear Nauseated,
This HR manager says she wants you to tell your co-worker while he's in flagrante, "Hold that thought!" as you scurry off to get her, so she can return and catch him, uh, red-handed. So now you have two problems: You sit next to a pervert, and your head of HR is an incompetent lunatic. I spoke to Philip Gordon, an employment law attorney in Boston, about your predicament. He was more astounded that HR put the onus of proving onanism on you than that there's a masturbator lurking in cubicle-land. You are not required to don latex gloves and do a forensic search through the guy's wastebasket for incriminating Kleenex. Once you reported this gross violation, HR's obligation was to investigate and act to address it. Gordon says the company can check the guy's computer to see if he's been downloading pröñography while he's been unloading—that's enough to get him fired. If he doesn't confess and there's no evidence, then at the very least the company has an obligation to take your complaint seriously enough to relocate him to a desk far away from you—preferably one with a 360-degree view, so they can keep an eye on him. If it's just for internal investigative purposes, the company might also be entitled to secretly videotape your pod. Since your HR department is a joke, you must take this complaint up the chain of command and explain the situation you find yourself in. Surely one of the bosses will be interested that the jerk-off you sit next to is creating a hostile work environment (and that the HR department is run by a dope). No one wants to get into a lawsuit, but a company that won't address a problem like this is one that really wants to end up in court.

—Prudie