Reflective Essay: Man Haters For Life Club

Over the years, I have run into at least a couple of women whose husband's had been unfaithful to them. Invariably, these women seemed to assume I should side with them, apparently simply because I am also female. (Some women seem to assume that all women are part of the Man Haters for Life Club. Sorry, I failed to sign up for that one.)

If I listened to them long enough, I eventually learned that these women were routinely refusing to have sex with their man and then vilifying him when he decided to get his needs met elsewhere. When I worked for a Fortune 500 company, I couldn't help but think of those women every fall when Overtime Season rolled around.

Overtime Season typically started around September and ended around the end of December. The people in charge of my department would watch the work pile up all summer and do nothing about it. Then, when it hit some particular level that they felt was unacceptable, they would announce that we were required to work overtime. (My understanding is this was not something they could actually require. Claiming it was required was just emotional pressure, not something they could legally back up, which made it a crappy thing to do.)

In other words, it was an artificially created crisis to begin with, because if they had been offering limited overtime all summer, the work
Often, people would have liked to have worked some overtime during the summer. It was common for me to talk to people who were grousing about wanting to work overtime for the extra money at some period when it was offered and frustrated that they couldn't manage to put in the hours when the company was trying to demand them. The Holiday Season was an especially bad time to ask overtime of