Angry, violated, down. That’s how I feel. I had a nasty fight with one of my workmates this past week. No, it wasn’t physical, not on my part at least.

But the adrenaline-raging male I quarreled with threatened to beat me up and in fact grabbed my hand and prodded my head a couple of times, calling me names and spewing a barrage of profanities. It was really horrible. It all started when he asked me to help him do something. He didn’t ask nicely but I went ahead and helped anyway.

Midway through the task, he walked up to me and said I wasn’t doing it right. I asked what was wrong with what I’d done and he said I should have done exactly what he told me. It was lunchtime, I was hungry and wasn’t about to let an ungrateful person give me a hard time. Abandoning the project, I told the guy to do it himself. His response was to accuse me of always trying to act smarter than others. I was shocked and at the same time angered by that accusation and so I told him off.

Next thing I knew, he was threatening to beat me up. "Go ahead, hit me right now,” I fired back. He asked what made me think he couldn’t hit me and wanted to know what I would do if he did. I told him he could do whatever he wanted, but I wouldn’t lower myself to his level and fight back. Of course being a guy, he’s stronger and would probably have beaten the daylights out of me.

But even if that wasn’t the case, I shun violence and I’ve never fought with anyone and I doubt I ever will. So I told the guy at work that if hitting me made him feel more of a man, then he shouldn’t waste anymore time talking but go ahead and let the fists talk. By this time, a couple of our other workmates had been drawn by the raised voices and two guys tried to calm my "attacker” but it took at least 10 minutes for the altercation to end.

I have to say that the clash didn’t occur out of the blue. The tension between us has been building for sometime though there weren’t any serious incidents before. It was mostly small things and disagreements here and there but you know how even small things can raise tempers quickly.

For instance, we have a sitting arrangement for our lunch break and we all know who sits where. But this guy always takes my seat and I know he does that on purpose. Plus, I don’t like the way he puts his legs on table tops. It’s a restaurant! What if a client walks in right now, I always ask him but he does the same thing again and again.

Words like thank you, excuse me or please don’t exist in his vocabulary and many times when I ask him to make way as I rush to serve a client, he takes his time, which really irritates me. The other peeve is asking silly questions.

There’re clocks and calendars all over the restaurant but he’ll still ask you for the date or time. Same thing with the prices of food and drinks. You’d think that with menus all over the place, he would make an effort to learn these.

After all, he’s a waiter and should know these prices off-head. I told him my thoughts on all these issues and I think that probably ticked him off.

I still don’t know what made him change his mind about hitting me. Either he thought I’d fight back or go straight to the manager. He doesn’t know this but the latter would have been my option, my only option.

To be continued…
nsophie77@yahoo.com