The Odd Duck Creeper

As promised, Part Two of my sexual harassment blog on “Creepers”

*Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

                Last July, as a present to myself for my 40th birthday, I decided to splurge and get my manuscript, Torched, professionally edited. It was a great learning experience and a lot of fun working a professional editor. But I thought I would relate a humorous conversation she and I had about my manuscript.

***Summarized this conversation for brevity, but you’ll get the point.

Editor: I really like your antagonist, Dennis. He’s a really great character. You have your romance going on in the foreground with creepy little Dennis in the background watching and plotting. How did you come up with him?

ME: Well, it’s funny you should ask that. There’s this one guy I used to work with, and he was kind of socially awkward. When I was working on my masters, I would stay in my office after hours late at night and work on my homework. He would come into my office and stare at me until I would notice him.

Editor: Wait—WHAT? Your serial killer is based on a real person? He would come into your office and stare at you?

ME: Uh—yeah. Really, it’s not as bad as it sounds. He was just a little awkward. He would just stare at you silently until you noticed him, then he would talk. Usually I just told him I was busy and he would go away.

Editor: OMG! That’s creepy.

ME: He just wanted to talk to someone. He would even bring me presents.

Editor: Presents? What?

And the more I talked and tried to convince her this wasn’t weird, the weirder it sounded.

Working in any field I think you encounter what I like to call, the ODD DUCK. If you have ever seen office space, he’s the Milton Waddams. Quiet, unkempt, usually not very popular. You won’t find him as the life of the office party. He’s usually hanging out in the corner by himself, just watching.

This particular co-worker of mine was an absolutely brilliant engineer and highly educated when you started talking to him. He and I often worked on jobs together so I got the chance to get to know him a little better than most. I also got to know more of his darker side. While brilliant, he had a definite chip on his shoulder when it came to women. Highly misogynistic, he would make terrible comments about women, but quickly follow them up with, “I’m just being honest.” And, of course, “I don’t mean you Daniella.”

He knew that I was an avid reader and a writer. I enjoy reading all genres, both fiction and non-fiction. Though when he found out that I wrote romance, this didn’t set well at all (even though I told him I wrote horror as well).

“Daniella you need to lay off that romance crap and read more war and killing stuff.”

He started bringing me presents. Which believe it or not were highly educational. One of his hobbies was history. He was really into history related to war. So he would bring me books, and being the person that I am, I’ll never turn down a free book. Usually he’d bring me non-fiction books or movies about war and killings. He did give me a fictional movie about the Templars, saying as he brought it into my office late one night after staring quietly at me for a while, “This is full of that romance crap you like. I’m sorry I bought it.”

Now before you think I was the only target of his affections, I wasn’t terribly worried because he did this to others. He would come into the office and stare at my alternate (who was a guy) and try to strike up conversations. From my interactions with him, I got the impression he had some sort of broad-spectrum autism. He often had difficulty just talking to people and would often wind up saying something incredibly in appropriate or offensive. To be honest, even though he could be quite insulting at times (and a little creepy the staring thing did get to you after a bit). I really felt that he was just kind of lonely. Having been somewhat of an outsider myself most of my life, I can relate.

So that was OD1. Let me relate the story of OD2…

*OD2 is reviewing a drawing package with me in my office. Not an unusual event as part of both our jobs. OD2 is also a little on the older and heavy-set side and has just come in from outside, so I presume that’s why he’s breathing like Darth Vader. He always does this, so I just shrug it off. He continually mumbles to himself while we go over the electrical portion of the work to be done on the project. He’s one of my odd customers that I deal with on a frequent basis here in Prudhoe and while I don’t mind his mumbling and heavy breathing, the smell of his greasy hair and his unwashed FR clothing does get to me after a while.

I’m sitting in my chair and he’s talking me through the scope of the electrical work as he leans over the one-line drawing, pointing out the changes he makes a strange snort. A glob of green-brown goop spatters across the white paper. It’s all I can do to not recoil from the snot rocket he’s just blown across the package. Without missing a beat, he wipes it away with his hand and keeps talking, mumbling and of course, heavy breathing. With as much stealth as I can muster, I pull a yellow post-it note from my desk and attach it to the page. I want to let our documentation tech know to re-print that one.

We finish the review, and he leaves. Admittedly, I’m laughing a little to myself over the yet another awkward OD2 encounter. I go down to the mechanical piping office to talk to my co-worker who has to deal with him on a fairly regular basis as well. As I relate the story, while both she and the other male engineer sharing her office start to laugh, they insist I close the door so they can tell me what he did while he was in her office (reviewing the mechanical portion of the same package).

“So what did he do?”

“Well we were reviewing the package,” O—- said, eyes wide. “And  he’s looking at me and talking about the pressures on the line, then all of a sudden he turns his head aside and says, ‘But you’re so hot,’ then turns back and keeps talking to me like nothing happened. He did it more than once.”

I look at C— the young EIT sharing her office and mentoring under her. “Yeah, I heard it too, it was so weird, like an aside in a cartoon or a movie.” They were both laughing, albeit, a little nervously.

“What a creep,” I replied. Then it hit me. The constant mumbling when he’s in my office. As some of you who follow me know, I don’t really hear that well. Due to a head injury, I sometimes have trouble processing speech. He was doing it to me too. I just couldn’t hear him/understand him. Of course, now we start talking to all of the other female engineers we know. Aaaaaaand as expected, Every single one of them has a weird/creepy OD2 story.

Now we wanted to write it off at first as maybe these guys are just socially awkward/clueless that their behavior is totally inappropriate. They have issues, so they just don’t understand. We had a lively debate with some of our male co-workers that really gave us pause. They felt that these guys knew exactly what they were doing, they were just using their awkwardness as an excuse to get away with inappropriate behavior.

What do you guys think after reading my descriptions of the ODD DUCKS? Are they truly clueless and just don’t know any better? Or are they taking advantage of the fact that they won’t be called on their behavior due to their awkwardness?

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned. We’re prepping for our first Chicken Run of the year, so my next blog post will be a humous story about the time I harassed the ptarmigan–shame on me!