I pride myself as being an obnoxious and bitchy woman. People are scared of me and that's the way I like it. I learned years ago, at the furniture store, that the head strong outspoken women are not sexually harassed (we had a bunch of 19 year old, mousy women there. Their lives must have been hell). I have always thought that prevention was the best way to handle these things.

He just snuck* up behind me and did a creepy arm rub.

Whenever anyone tries to get cutesy with me, I turn into ultra offensive and insulting woman. It's a defense mechanism not unlike that of a skunk or a porcupine. Although now that I think of it, if I could shoot quills out of my back, Chester the Molester might get the picture.

Anyhoo, another workplace irregular, Creepy Dave, finds my ultra offensive and insulting persona attractive. This really flummoxes me as I hadn't thought to have a back up defense. Do I then become nice to Creepy Dave? So far, I have become even more insulting. I think he sees us to be like the characters on Moonlighting, trading flirtatious insults. At least he never gets touchy feely.

Just to show you how Creepy Dave is, let me tell you a few things about him. He is in his mid-forties and he likes to go to college campuses to crash parties. He was bragging about how he always hits Michigan State for the welcome back weekend. He once asked me if I knew of an intramural volleyball team. He wants to go and watch. I suppose that there is nothing inherently creepy about watching volleyball, but coming from him�well, it struck me as creepy.

So my plan is to stay as far away from Chester the Molester as possible. I have turned down team dinners for this reason and refused to attend conferences. If he wasn't so damned good at sneaking up on me this wouldn't be that big of a problem. Creepy Dave is less of a problem as I often just go ahead and tell him to his face how creepy he is.

* look what I just found when I looked up snuck: Snuck is an Americanism first introduced in the 19th century as a nonstandard regional variant of sneaked. Widespread use of snuck has become more common with every generation. It is now used by educated speakers in all regions. Formal written English is more conservative than other varieties, of course, and here snuck still meets with much resistance. Many writers and editors have a lingering unease about the form, particularly if they recall its nonstandard origins. And 67 percent of the Usage Panel disapproved of snuck in our 1988 survey. Nevertheless, an examination of recent sources shows that snuck is sneaking up on sneaked. Snuck was almost 20 percent more common in newspaper articles published in 1995 than it was in 1985. Snuck also appears in the work of many respected columnists and authors: �He ran up huge hotel bills and then snuck out without paying� (George Stade). �He had snuck away from camp with a cabinmate� (Anne Tyler). �I ducked down behind the paperbacks and snuck out� (Garrison Keillor).