Unix and Sexual Harrassment

My wife and I were discussing some favorite high school teachers. I was telling her a story about Mr. Scott, my physics teacher. The guy had a slight southern accent and spoke real slow, so slow some of us thought he might have had a stroke at some point.

One day, he asked one of the cheerleaders to assist him in a demonstration, she expressed reluctance, and he replied with: "what's a matter, you don't love me anymore?" The rest of the class busted up. He was just so deadpan and she was just such a little priss, it just worked. We were on the floor.

My wife pointed out that such a gag might have worked 20 years ago, but today he'd be facing a sexual harrassment complaint. And that reminded me of my friend, George.

George was a co-worker at Nortel-Micom and was a classroom trainer, teaching customers (or their designated tech people who got sent to training) how to set-up and manage their Micom Marathon WAN Mux (Wide Area Network Multiplexer) units. And it was a popular class. They had a unit called the V/FM (Voice/Fax Multiplier) which did a variant of VOIP. You took a rack of Marathons, slapped them full of VOIP cards, and you could use them to turn a T1 (the equivalent of 24 phone lines) into 168+ voice lines.

George's classroom was basically a little WAN lab with a handful of racks of Marathons that people could use to get hands-on experience as they learned. And since a lot of people coming into the class had little or no networking experience, the class began with some basic networking concepts.

One of these concepts was "finger". It's a program that lets you look up information about a user on a machine, and looking up someone's information with that program is considered fingering them. So, with all the students' accounts established on a machine, George would then have them look up the info on one of the students in the class. Unfortunately, in this particular instance George picked the one and only woman in the class and said: "Now let's all finger Debbie."

George didn't mean it sexually in any way, but when the men in the class started giggling like Beavis and Butthead, Debbie got steamed. Two days later, George was called into his manager's office to find out that Debbie had reported him for sexual harrassment. He would get a note in his employee record and he was required to write a letter of apology to her. He hadn't meant anything by it and it was an entirely valid thing to say, but it got him in trouble anyway.

So, if you're trying to teach a mixed-sex class about networking, here are some things not to say:

• Let's finger Debbie.
• Let's sniff Debbie's packets.
• Let's knock on Debbie's ports.
• When Debbie gets back from the bathroom, we'll analyze her logs.

  Any other suggestions? Post them below.

  This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.