What's coming this time? Am I the secretary, the woman for getting coffee or holding the cables? They ask me where the colleague is? When is my boss coming? Or poisoned advance praise will fall: class, how you look after your husband! As annoying as it used to be when the special praise came for the first in math and physics - why great? With the boys, that's normal and not worth mentioning. So much for the rhetoric point catalog. Then the civil engineer distributes points for the facial expressions: Are they looking confused or even flabbergasted? Do they look strained and relaxed, the way people look when they see a wheelchair user but don't want to stare at him? Or do they just look neutral - that would be best, but it rarely happens.
Instead of staying in the constant anger loop about stupid prejudices against female engineers, our engineer decided to simply turn the tables.
With her solidarity male colleagues, she makes fun of playing prejudice bingo during a customer contact or a first ascent and distributing the points in her mind.
Some people ask what makes them so cheerful.
She tells the sympathetic about bingo and sometimes about the fact that as a child she was interested in the doll's house and its statics, not in its well-dressed and coiffed residents.
Most of them laugh too.
Others rumble off as they explain the world: You women can't be please either!
- We know that feeling well enough, she says then.
In the nine-to-five column, changing authors write about curiosities from everyday life in the office and university.