Throughout my career, I can honestly say I never dipped my pen in the company ink, if you get my meaning. I came close, once, at a Christmas party, with a recordist from the Sunset-Gower lot, but some friends realized I was making a total ass of myself and intervened. I was really drunk. I mean, offensively drunk. I only weighed 140 pounds back then, so it didn’t take much. My friends poured me into a cab, and sent me home. I got some strange looks from the guy the next day, but no harm, no foul.
When we had just moved into the new building on Olive, there was this guy in Design & Visuals on the third floor. He was very handsome, but for all I know he could have been a total creep. We never spoke, but to exchange “hellos” when passing in the hall; I simply admired him from afar.
And it would have stayed that way if I hadn’t confided in a coworker that there was a really hot guy in Chan’s department on three. We were in our mandatory sexual harassment training… I should rephrase that, because it sounds like we were getting training on how to carry out sexual harassment! No, this was an in-service for managers with 25 or more direct or indirect reports on how to identify, prevent, and handle sexual harassment in the workplace, and the workshop facilitator had us doing what facilitators of these sorts of things always come around to: role playing.
My “friend” (here I use the term advisedly and in quotation marks) blurts out, “Matt’s in love with a guy on three.” Mr. Facilitator then had us act out various vignettes in which I, as this young man’s boss (technically, he was an indirect report, I supervised his boss), would say and do things in a role playing scenario with my “friend” acting the part of my now not-so-secret crush, and the rest of the workshop attendees would shout out “Red Light,” “Yellow Light,” or “Green Light” to indicate “stop-don’t do that,” “proceed with caution,” or “go ahead-everything’s fine” respectively.
Several weeks later, I had just arrived at work and parked my car in the subterranean garage reserved for officers of the company and clients. Employees parked in a parking structure across the street and entered the building through the lobby on the first floor. I got in the elevator and pressed 4 to get to my office, carrying several large three-ring binders containing replacement parts for the building’s HVAC system that plant maintenance needed me to order, but it stopped at 1 and the young man who had my eye entered on his way up to his cubicle to start his day. We exchanged furtive smiles and each muttered “morning.” He was holding a Venti Starbucks and his employee Id badge (which was needed to “swipe in” to the building) in his right hand, a backpack/satchel in his left, and as he went to press 3 he dropped his badge.
Chivalry is not dead for us Wilkinsons, so I immediately knelt on one knee to pick it up for him as the elevator doors closed and we began our ascent. As I did, the elevator made a slight jerk causing me to lose my balance and fall sideways dropping the three-ring binders I was carrying all over the floor. I was now lying on my side in a sea of three-ring binders. It was most undignified. I was mortified. Not a good look.
But chivalry was not dead for this young man as well. Turns out he was not a creep. He set his coffee down and reached out his hand. I took it and managed to get myself up on one knee, then both knees, such that I was now kneeling directly in front of him, eye-level with his zipper. I won’t lie and say I’ve never found myself on my knees in that same position in front of a handsome young man before, but certainly never at work!
At that moment, we arrived on the third floor. My boss Ron, president of the New Media division for which I was Vice President of Facilities & Logistics, had been waiting for the elevator to take him up to his office on the fourth floor’s “mahogany row” where all the execs hung out. He took one look at the scene in the elevator as the doors opened to reveal me on my knees with my face in the crotch of a subordinate, and said, with a mixture of shock and horror, “Oh Matt … Red Light!”
