I Don't Want Your Free Lesson
Usually when I go to Lowe's the people working there are very nice and helpful, but inevitably, there is some dude customer who wants to exert his dominance over me be aggressively offering free lessons. He assumes I must not know the first thing about what I'm doing there, because I'm a woman. He simply must bestow upon me the superior knowledge given to him by his penis. Last week I was there with a girl-friend of mine to buy supplies for a workshop we were helping another friend prepare for. He started out by standing way too close to us in line, looking back and forth between our faces and the items in our hands, and glaring, like, how could we have the audacity to be buying such stuff. Then it's my turn to check out, and he starts in on me.Dude: “What do you need with that much water line? 150 feet?!?!”
Me: “Actually, it's 300 feet. It's for a workshop our friend is teaching.”He grabs the stuff out of my hand to see for himself.Dude: “Oh, you're right, 300 feet! Let me ask you this, how do you plan on cutting this stuff?”His tone is not helpful or nice, but aggressive, like he's challenging me.Me: “I don't know. I'm not the one teaching the workshop, but the woman teaching it has done it many times before, so I assume she knows what she's doing. I'm just here to follow the supplies list she gave me.”I look at the cashier and roll my eyes.Dude: “Oh, okay, well I guess I won't tell you how to cut it then, since you're not going to be doing any cutting.”The cashier, noting my annoyance and his aggressiveness, then starts a pleasant exchange about how fun the workshop sounds, focusing intently on me and ignoring dude completely. This exchange carries us through the rest of the transaction and turns my shopping experience around again. To the cashier, thanks, you made a difference. To dude, NO THANKS. DON'T DO THAT AGAIN, to me or anyone else. Nobody likes it!
Happened on July 10, 2016
Incident reported by target
Bystander Action? Yes
Harassment Types: Sexual
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