Read the room, Bill!
Even Bill's most clumsy, seemingly naive overtures toward employees were potentially destructive. Here's why.
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.