Note: Following is an edited and updated version of a story I wrote just after Albini’s passing in May of last year.

Wednesday marked exactly a year since prolific and legendary record producer Steve Albini died. Albini’s death, and now its anniversary, has left me thinking about a chance conversation I had with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic more than a decade ago — about Albini’s work with Nirvana and Albini’s opinion of the band’s third studio record.

I was covering cops and courts in those days but had written a few stories about Novoselic, who lived along the Lower Columbia River and was studying pre-law at the local community college.

Novoselic had always been kind, quick to return reporters’ calls and more generous than he needed to be with his time. The two of us sat outside his farmhouse one evening as he explained a political cause he’d taken up. And Novoselic shared a ton I’d never known about Nirvana’s history when the band was inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.

He’d spent much of this sunny, September morning in court rooms, observing hearings for one of his class assignments.

“Tony!” he called across the court house’s lobby. “How are you? How was your summer?”

A lot of work, I said, but also a lot of fun.

“How about you?”

“Busy!” Novoselic said. “I played Safeco Field1 with Paul McCartney!”

“My God! That’s great!” I said, and it occurred to me I’d likely never again hear those words spoken in that order by another human being.

Pat Smear, Nirvana’s former touring guitarist and now a Foo Fighter, had helped set the whole thing up, Novoselic told me.

Pat: “Paul wants to play ‘Helter Skelter.’”

A slightly panicked Krist: “But I don’t know ‘Helter Skelter!’”

Novoselic recalled catching a glimpse of himself projected on a towering screen. (“Whoa! I’m big!”)

And he and his wife were so giddy after the performance, they threw open their chauffeured van’s doors at a downtown Seattle stoplight and burst into the summer night, leaving behind their befuddled driver.

I found all of this endlessly amusing – and more than a little surreal. Here was a member of one of the world’s greatest and most-hallowed rock bands, himself wide-eyed and agog as he described sharing a stage with a Beatle. It was enough to make the tips of your fingers tingle.

But it wasn’t until Novoselic mentioned what he’d been up to in more recent weeks that my knees buckled. He said he’d piloted his single-engine plane all the way to Chicago. The reason: to remaster Nirvana’s third studio record, “In Utero.”

“Steve always felt the mix on that record was a little flat,” Novoselic said.

“Steve?” I asked.

“You know, Steve Albini!”

I slowly reached back and steadied myself against the wooden bench behind me.

Hearing Albini’s name spoken with such casual familiarity — spoken by the likes of Novoselic, no less — was like stepping into a dream world.

There are rock gods in the sense that people worship them.

And then there are Rock Gods like Albini, who have earned the distinction for their sheer creative power: “Let there be drums and bass and guitars and vocals and backing vocals – and let it all be loud. Really goddamned loud.”

Albini could conjure all manner of magic, thunder, passion, power, truest love and lust. And it’s often near impossible to figure how he did it.

Which is why, a year after Albini’s death, we can’t stop talking about him.

On Saturday night, The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow gave a shout-out to Albini during a careening, breakneck show at Seattle’s Neptune Theatre. Albini produced four of The Jesus Lizard’s earth-shaking records, including its first EP and a split-single with Nirvana. The Neptune crowd (and Yow, of course) went wild.

In what amounts to an online estate sale, thousands of Albini’s vinyl records, rare and odd books, t-shirts and other possessions went up for sale this week on a website called Steve Albini’s Closet. For most, visiting the website will be a digital pilgrimage in search of relics.

Albini was behind the boards on so many indie-rock albums, he’s revered by millions of music fans who have come to know him by a wildly disparate variety of bands.

Some revere Albini for Silkworm’s “Lifestyle” or Big Black’s “Atomizer” or, notably, Superchunk’s “No Pocky for Kitty” and Slint’s “Tweez.”

For me it’s always been Albini’s work on the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” easily among my top-10 all time favorite records. There’s a kind of dark, supernatural energy that spins off that record. It’s all at once eccentric, feral — and full of wonder and joy. “Surfer Rosa,” is more than the sum of its parts. It also happens to melt the paint off walls.

Another Albini-produced favorite: The Breeders’ “Pod. “Last Splash” may be The Breeders’ money maker. But “Pod,” another full-length debut, is Kim Deal and Co.’s Albini-produced masterpiece.

“He built worlds,” The Breeders said on Facebook shortly after Albini’s death.

Albini also produced PJ Harvey’s incomparable “Rid of Me,” which, even played at sensible volume, can leave cracks in the ceiling.

And, yes, there’s “In Utero,” Nirvana’s last studio record before Kurt Cobain’s death. It’s somehow as raw as it is complex. And yet, like Albini, I also thought it a bit flat in the mix.

But I didn’t tell Novoselic that. How could I?

An important disclaimer: My ear is anything but well-trained, and I can operate a sprawling sound board about as well as a troupe of spider monkeys can fly a 737.

I listen with my body as much as my ears. I feel the best stuff in my chest. When it’s right, the hair stands up on my arms and the back of my neck. My heart quickens. Everything feels all charged and radioactive.

All of which is to say when a mix is flat, I know it’s flat. That much I know.

I started collecting vinyl records about five years after that courthouse conversation with Novoselic. Among my first purchases (fittingly at West Seattle’s Easy Street Records) was the remastered version of “In Utero” that Novoselic and Albini had worked on together all those summers ago.

They got it right — guided in no small part, I’m sure, by Albini’s instinct.

The mix on that record isn’t flat. Not anymore.

Jeff Bezos has never denied that Amazon is a tough gig.

"It's not easy to work here," the company's founder and CEO famously wrote in a letter to shareholders more than two decades ago. "You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three."

Bezos has long exalted Amazon's workers as elite, an army of tireless tech ninjas who can make quick reality of grand ideas.

Amazon is exceptional. But its greatest distinction isn’t its breakneck work ethic — it’s that it counts among its ranks two kinds of workers: well-paid execs, software engineers, marketers, scientists and lawyers on its corporate campuses and manual laborers, paid by the hour, toiling across thousands of warehouses.

When it comes to its workforce, Amazon more resembles General Motors or Ford than it does Apple or Microsoft.

There's a big difference between white- and blue-collar work. Yet, Amazon has long enforced its hard-driving corporate philosophy on both.

Amazon's warehouse workers say they skip bathroom breaks to meet performance expectations. Delivery drivers urinate in Gatorade bottles so they can finish their routes on time. And the pace at which Amazon pushes its warehouse crews recently drew a fine from regulators in its home state of Washington.

The company, by its own count, had more than 14,000 serious injuries in 2019, according to one report. That’s almost twice the industry average.

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg coined the tech-industry motto “Move fast and break things,” I doubt he was talking about torn ligaments and herniated disks.

Operating its warehouses at a safer and more sustainable pace isn’t just good for workers, it’s good for Amazon’s reputation and its long-term interests.

True, Amazon pays its blue-collar workers at least twice the federal minimum wage. It also provides low-skill jobs in communities that need them most.

But it's also clear many of Amazon’s drivers and warehouse workers simply can't keep up.

As a result, its logistics operations are under more scrutiny than ever, its blue-collar workers are quitting in droves and unions are increasingly threatening the company’s business model.

Amazon’s turbocharged corporate culture has taken its toll on its white-collar workers as well. Employees cry at their desks, cracking under a Darwinian corporate culture designed to burn through all but the fittest employees, The New York Times has reported.

In an extreme example of the pressures Amazon workers face, an Amazon employee survived a leap off the South Lake Union campus's 12-story Apollo building in 2016 after he’d been put on a performance improvement plan.

Suicide attempts notwithstanding, nobody’s losing much sleep over a bunch of software engineers and execs pushed to the brink. They’re pulling in fat checks and obscene stock options. They're educated and in high demand. Should Amazon’s pressure cooker prove too much, these people can find jobs anywhere.

Not so when it comes to Amazon’s drivers and warehouse crews. They earn barely enough to get by in most large U.S. cities. They face narrower job options. And every day brings risk of injury — often followed by financial ruin.

A company seen as leaning unrealistically hard its blue-collar workforce doesn't evoke ambition and innovation so much as the workers’ rights battles of the 19th century.

Amazon doesn't seem to get this, and that's why it’s on the defensive when it comes to its warehouse workers. 

Legend has it that Dave Clark — who helped invent Amazon's logistics operations and is now the company's second in command — earned the nickname "The Sniper" after lurking in warehouses and singling out slow or distracted workers to be fired.

When was the last time you heard of a senior executive — a multi-millionaire no less — bothering to personally cull his company’s lowest ranks? It's like something out of an Upton Sinclair novel.

Even before the pandemic, Amazon’s U.S. logistics workforce was bleeding out at a rate of 3% each week, according to The New York Times. That means Amazon's hourly workforce is turning over at a rate of 150% a year. The company is burning through so many warehouse workers, some of its executives worry it will run out of Americans to hire, The Times said.

It’s no secret Amazon’s warehouse crews and drivers are a temporary solution to a problem its engineers have yet to solve.

The company can deploy millions of lines of computer code that categorize, collect, track and guide merchandise to its intended destination. Amazon has poured vast amounts of capital into designing, building and buying robotics that promise to automate virtually every step of the delivery process.

For now, it still needs human muscle to accomplish the so-called “last mile” of the delivery process — that is, loading up boxes and packages and tossing them on porches.

But if Amazon has its way, a day will come when it sheds the vast majority of its manual laborers and replaces them with robots. That day isn’t here yet — and labor unions constitute the biggest credible threat to its arrival.

On Thursday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced a new campaign to organize Amazon's warehouse employees. The decision comes just months after Amazon thwarted an effort to unionize one of its warehouses in Bessemer, Alabama.

Should the Teamsters gain control of Amazon’s warehouses, the union will surely make it much more difficult for Amazon to phase out the humans while it phases in the robots.

If Amazon wants to eventually get rid of its blue-collar workers, it has to, at least for now, treat them as though it wants them to stay.

Get in touch: Feel free to reach me at tlystra@satellitenw.com.

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CNN welcomed journalist Jeffrey Toobin back to its broadcasts late last week, roughly eight months after The New Yorker fired him for accidentally exposing himself during a Zoom staff meeting.

This would be totally unremarkable, except Toobin's misstep is an unmitigated case study of how our careers, aided and abetted by Zoom and Microsoft Teams, overran and occupied our homes during the pandemic.

It's also true that Toobin's situation was handled dreadfully — as though it had been thrown to a chittering huddle of middle schoolers who failed to recognize that his conduct had more to do with the circumstances brought by the pandemic than it did his character.

Toobin appeared on CNN late last week for the first time since October and, in an interview with Alisyn Camerota, apologized, then explained what went wrong.

"I didn't think I was on the call. I didn't think other people could see me," Toobin said. "I thought I had turned off the Zoom call. Now, that's not a defense. This was deeply moronic and indefensible. But that is part of the story."

In other words, Toobin is more guilty of not knowing how to use Zoom than he is of a moral failing. He thought he was in the privacy of his own home. He wasn't.

The New Yorker suspended then fired Toobin following the incident. He took a break from CNN, too, until the network allowed him to return as its chief legal analyst last week.

Since October, Toobin has been the subject of public ridicule, including no less than two Saturday Night Live sketches. Late night talk show hosts have had a field day. All of which, I suppose, is to be expected.

Still, I keep asking myself, if Toobin didn't intend for anyone to see him, why is this a story? Possibly because there are those who don't believe Toobin. Possibly because there's more to the story than we know. Possibly because we’re all middle schoolers when it comes to this sort of thing. And possibly because the experience of being on that call was so horrific that, regardless of Toobin's intentions, it can't be excused.

There's no question the October incident wreaked pure terror on everyone involved – not the least of which Toobin, a 27-year veteran of the magazine who has authored seven books, including "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court."

His colleagues described briefly seeing Toobin touching, um, the area his bathing suit covers. And there's some indication that his actions might have amounted to a flirtatious joke intended for someone else. Witnesses said they saw Toobin blow a kiss to someone other than his colleagues. Toobin then left the call. He logged back on moments later, seemingly oblivious to what everyone else had seen.

Every morning, still barely conscious, I open a can of cat food for our two cats, Tracer and Iggy Pop. It smells horrible, and if I get a whiff of it at the wrong moment my body shudders and I sometimes dry heave. That's how I feel when I think about what it must have been like to be on that New Yorker call – more because of the shock and embarrassment than anything else.

Editor David Remnick was surely left with no choice but to end the meeting, summon HR with bright, glowing shot fired high from a flare gun and then give everyone a time-out to burn sage, call their priest or drink heavily — whatever it took for The New Yorker's staff to find its happy place again.

Toobin, meanwhile, must've felt like a dog hit by a car. I'm sure he wanted to crawl off somewhere dark and die.

He’s described the time since the incident as the "most miserable months in my life" and said he's been "trying to be a better person."

"I'm in therapy," he said. "Trying to do some public service. Working in a food bank. Working on a new book."

While it's true the incident amounted to a waking nightmare, let's be grownups here. With millions working from home for more than a year, a mishap like this was bound to happen.

Toobin was doing, in what he thought was a private moment, something we consider in 2021 to be healthy and normal, at least in moderation. As a matter of fact, there's evidence sexual release helps overcome writer's block and enhances creativity.

So if Toobin didn't expose himself to his colleagues on purpose, why does he need to be in therapy? And why does he need to do penance by working at a food bank?

It's admirable that he's doing these things, but what he really needs, I think, is an hour with tech support.

There are other mitigating factors to consider in Toobin's case as well.

By October, when the call took place, we'd all been in lockdown for about six months, and life had pretty much become a Stephen King novel, so much so that King himself said this: "I'm sorry."

Last fall, when I saw the first New York Times headline about the Toobin incident, it didn't strike me as another case of #MeToo. My first thought was that the solitude of quarantine was driving people batty.

"Dear God, the wheels are coming off," I muttered as I read The Times' story.

The Toobin situation was an object lesson of the pandemic's bombshell-like disruption: Isolation, shattered routines, constant stress and woefully blurred lines between work and personal life.

People's homes had become like submarines deep at sea, and Zoom and Microsoft Teams were the only portals through which we saw the outside world — and through which the outside world could see into our lives.

Of course these problems reached far beyond The New Yorker. One woman reportedly took her laptop to the bathroom during a meeting, but forgot to turn off the camera. Another woman emerged from the shower and streaked her husband's video call on her way to the linen closet for a towel. A far more intentional transgression: During last year's first day of online learning, a Seattle middle school student dropped a porn link into a Teams chat that included hundreds of students. Mayhem ensued.

Meanwhile, the booze aisle at the SoDo Costco was regularly pillaged. People wearing torn sweats and their old Duran Duran t-shirts sent emails late into the night while devouring microwavable lasagna and sipping Chablis. Xanax and Valium use spiked. And employers started talking about their workers' mental health in a way they never had. In fact, Microsoft gave its employees an extra week off, just to keep them sane.

If office life had once resembled "Downton Abbey," working from home had become "Beyond Thunderdome." People may have kept their game faces on, but we all knew it was getting a little ragged behind the scenes.

All of this context matters when we're talking about what Toobin did.

At the very least, I think Toobin should have waited until he knew his colleagues were offline. He could have slapped a sticky note over his webcam or aimed it at the ceiling. He could have gone into another room, safely out of view of his work laptop. If he was getting saucy with someone online, he could have logged on via his phone or iPad instead of what I presume was his work computer. All of this would have prevented the situation that ended his New Yorker career.

In addition, one could argue that all of us working from home during the pandemic shouldn't do anything we wouldn't do at the office. Strict eight-to-five hours. No cat naps. And certainly nothing like what Toobin did.

But rare is the person with that kind of discipline, especially for 18 months and counting. And you can't tell me that couples stuck working from home together didn't occasionally rendezvous midday to blow off a little steam.1

Even as he acknowledged he was in the wrong, Toobin said he thought The New Yorker's decision to fire him "was excessive." I agree. And so does Tina Brown, the former New Yorker editor who hired Toobin.

“I think 27 years of superb reporting and commitment to The New Yorker should have been weighed against an incident that horribly embarrassed the magazine but mostly embarrassed himself,” Brown told The New York Times.

Longtime New Yorker contributor and author of many books Malcolm Gladwell told the Times he also didn't understand the magazine's decision to fire Toobin.

“I read the (New Yorker parent company) Condé Nast news release, and I was puzzled because I couldn’t find any intellectual justification for what they were doing. They just assumed he had done something terrible, but never told us what the terrible thing was," Gladwell said. "And my only feeling — the only way I could explain it — was that Condé Nast had taken an unexpected turn toward traditional Catholic teaching.”

The Times reporter wrote that Gladwell then produced a Bible and read aloud from Genesis 38, in which God "strikes down a man for succumbing to the sin of self-gratification.”

Work/life balance: Mounted on our dining room wall is an assortment of work supplies as well as a Nerf arsenal, often used to settle father-son disputes.

The crash sounded like someone had taken a sledgehammer to a Buick’s hood. It was the kind of noise that shook your insides, and it came in the middle of the workday, right before deadline.

I found Jack at his desk, frozen, his eyes supersized and beginning to fill with tears.

Then I spotted the TV. It was upside-down on the living room floor.

“Are you OK?” I asked. 

Jack nodded. The sound of the fall had scared him, and he was overcome with a great deal of remorse for having, by all appearances, committed involuntary manslaughter against our television.

“I’m sorry!” Jack said, big tears now streaming down his face. 

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK. It’s just a TV.”

My heart was still pounding, and the deadline was creeping ever closer. I was trying to be reassuring, but the words came out sharp and pointed.

My body felt like it was being pulled in three directions at once, which had become a familiar sensation during the pandemic. I looked at Jack. I looked at the TV. I glanced at the clock, then toward the blinking cursor on my monitor.

There are any number of reasons “Bring Your Kid to Work Day” happens only once a year. This had to be near the top of the list.

Still, Jack has been a saint when it comes to accommodating my work schedule during the pandemic. In fact, the little guy has stepped up to meet this moment in every way. I couldn’t ask more of a 10-year-old. And I’ll always smile when I think of the two of us hunkered down in this apartment together. 

There have been nightly wrestling matches, Nerf gun wars and the occasional water fight. We’ve spun records at top volume — U2, Hüsker Dü, The Ramones, The Clash as well as two of Jack’s personal favorites, Gorillaz “Demon Days” and Sugar’s “Copper Blue.” We’ve shot Nerf darts off the balcony. We even invented our own absurdist form of martial arts. (Don’t ask – you had to be there.)

Still, of the many ways the pandemic upended all that we previously took for granted, tossing work and family life in a blender might be the most disruptive.

Roughly half of all parents working from home said they’ve been distracted and have had trouble getting work done during the pandemic, according to a Pew Research study published late last year.

By contrast, only 20% of remote workers without kids said the same.

At the pandemic’s outset, I was adjusting to life as a newly single dad – and helping a little person through big feelings about his parents’ divorce, praying all the while I was getting it right.

I spent hours on the phone with my attorney. There were other calls with my parents, whose divorce had unleashed itself at almost precisely the same time as my own. (I am not making this up.) 

Meanwhile, Jack, just like every other kid, couldn’t see his friends nor play soccer in his regular league. No recess. No evening school performances led by his music teacher. No showing me around his classroom during open house nights. No stopping by his teacher’s desk when he had a question. Just screens. All the time screens. He handled it like a champ, but I worried. 

And although the world had seemingly shut down, my life was speeding up. I interviewed tech executives, AirPods tucked in my ears, while helping Jack find the Go-Gurts in the fridge. I covered the governor’s Covid briefings while stirring mac and cheese. And in the evenings I planned what stories I’d write next while washing dishes and folding laundry.

Trying to focus felt at times like gripping the leash of a pit-bull who’d just caught the scent of a rotting deer carcass. 

Sleep didn’t always come easy, and work seemed to be the best substitute. In fact, work felt pretty good. Sure, I was overwhelmed. Yes, my focus was often shot. But trying to sort my way through it all was a welcome distraction from everything else. 

I’d tuck Jack into bed, then jump back on my MacBook. I returned emails at 10 p.m. I pored over SEC documents at 1 a.m. I sometimes wrote at 2 a.m. or later to get a jump on the next day’s deadlines.

There was also the online class for startup founders I was co-teaching. I’d jumped in at the last minute at the request of one of our publication’s a vice presidents.

And there was the podcast I hosted and produced, which was something I’d never done before. I’d researched and bought software, learned sound editing, chased down theme music and figured out how to distribute the finished product.

A bonus: the audio had glitched in the first two episodes, and I was racing to fix it.

“Yes!” I shouted, my voice booming across the apartment once I managed to figured it out.

“Nice work, Dad!” Jack called out.

In hindsight, I should have taken a breather, learned yoga, eaten more salads. Instead, I put my head down and plowed forward.

“Onward and overboard,” as a good friend likes to say. 

And now the TV had been maimed – possibly killed – in a freak accident. 

“How – I mean how – did this happen?” I demanded.

The question, it occurred to me, had become universal.

Here’s how it happened: Jack reclined the back of his gaming chair, then gave the chair a quick twirl. He’s spent much of his fifth-grade year in that chair, which means he’s executed this maneuver thousands of times flawlessly and without incident. 

The difference this time was that we’d just moved his desk to a new spot in the living room, which happened to be closer to the TV. As the chair spun, its back bashed into all 55 inches of that flatscreen, which did a half-backflip off the entertainment console and landed upside-down against the wall. 

Ten points on the dismount, even from the East German judge. 

Being a kid is hard. Kids exist in their own realm of space and physics. It’s a constant and unyielding fact of life, and there’s no sense getting mad about it.

With that in mind, I can’t tell you this was my best parenting moment, but Jack and I were laughing not long after that TV took a dive.

Somehow, for every tough moment during these strange and harrowing months, there have been exponentially more graces.

Since the pandemic’s beginning, Jack and I have been walking down to a neighborhood bench overlooking the Sound. We call them our “night walks.” Along the way, we search the sky for planets. Jack’s really good at spotting them. He tells me about all things Minecraft or what he’s learned watching his favorite science channel on YouTube. Sometimes he reaches out and holds my hand and we walk in silence.

I’ve taught Jack bits of rock and roll history. We customize mechanical keyboards together. We set off for Target or Ikea and scroll Amazon and OfferUp, collecting all we need for our new home — bit by bit, as each paycheck allows. And we adopted two cats: Tracer and Iggy Pop, who chew on Jack’s toes during class and climb on me during Teams calls.

I recently let Jack download “Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War” on the condition that he let me teach him about the real Cold War. So we got a book, and we’ve been checking out Russia, Vietnam, Cuba and Afghanistan on Google Earth. We’re also hosting our own Cold War Film Festival. Our most recent showing: “Top Gun.” Next up: “The Hunt for Red October” and “Spy Game.” We’ve even discussed what Bowie was talking about when he wrote “Heroes.”

Father-son-disputes are usually settled by Nerf gun or more drastic measures. One night when Jack refused to take a shower, I dragged him by his feet across the kitchen laminate and threatened to put him in the dishwasher.

That kid has got the greatest laugh. It’s almost the same as when he was a baby, and it sounds as though he’s so overcome with happiness he’s about to hyperventilate.

There have been moments, especially early on, when Jack had the weight of a global pandemic and a new divorce coming down on him. He didn’t know what to do with all of those feelings, and you could see it in his face and in the way he carried his body.

“Here goes nothing,” I’d say to myself. “Get it right, Lystra.”

And then Jack and I would talk it through. On one occasion, I asked him to show me where he feels the stress. Jack pressed his hand agains his chest.

“All of that’s totally normal,” I said. “Trust me, the feelings will pass – they always do.”

I may as well have been trying to reassure myself, too.

But the next part? That was just for Jack.

“You know I’ll always have your back, right? Oh, and by the way, none of this is your fault, kiddo. Keep doing exactly what you’re doing, because you rule.”

Jack smiled. The kid’s goofy bounce was back, and his face glowed the way it usually does. He wrapped his arms around me and we held on tight.

I sighed a relieved sigh.

Then Jack picked up a Nerf gun, aimed it at my head and pulled the trigger.

“Ow!” I said. I smiled and rubbed my temple.

Jack laughed.

He aimed and pulled the trigger again.

Get in touch: Feel free to reach me at tlystra@satellitenw.com.

You’re killing us, Bill. Monday’s headline from the New York Post.

In the weeks since reports of Bill Gates’ affairs and awkward workplace advances landed on page one of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I keep coming back to one account by a Gates Foundation employee.

The woman told The Times last month the following: She and Bill traveled to New York on behalf of the foundation in 2007 or 2008. She was standing next to Bill at a cocktail party when he lowered his voice and said, “I want to see you. Will you have dinner with me?”

The executive, whose name and age remain anonymous, said she felt uncomfortable and, like so many other women cornered by their bosses, “laughed to avoid responding.”

Bill’s alleged trysts and overtures have been far more clumsy than predatory, people close to the Gateses say. Some women no doubt shrugged them off. Others welcomed them.

Still, based on the short Times account, Bill’s proposed New York liaison looks more like an act of sabotage than unchecked libido.

It’s not that women can’t handle this sort of thing. It’s that they have to. When workplace advances come from the likes of Bill Goddamned Gates, they can amount to nothing less than intimidation. Even, intentional or not, coercion.

It appears Bill ambushed this woman in public, where it was all but impossible for her to respond honestly without making a scene. And he did it while she was trying to do her damned job, a job devoted to working on his behalf, for Christ’s sake.

Imagine you’re this Gates Foundation employee. You’ve worked your ass off until you’re standing at a New York cocktail party next to Bill Goddamned Gates himself.

…And then Bill hits on you.

I’m no shrink, but considering this is Bill Goddamned Gates and this woman worked for Bill Goddamned Gates, I’d bet good money his sad and sloppy proposition knocked her off her game and turned her brain, at least for a moment, into a terrified thought blender.

“What am I supposed to say here? How do I get out of this and keep my job? Is anybody in the room looking at me? What does my face look like right now? Jesus Christ, stay calm! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

And then the coup de grâce: “Is that why I’m here?”

Or something like that.

What may seem like mere carelessness on the surface (For the love of God, Bill, read the room!) turned out, by my estimation, to be an especially cruel thing to do to another human being.

And what did Bill’s employee do? She laughed — because she thought she had to. 

What she couldn’t say — although she should have said it, even if it risked her job — is this: “We work together, Bill. So cool yourself on down there, alright?” 

Get in touch: Feel free to reach me at tlystra@satellitenw.com.