sleialgnion gets harshed
"We also have heard some of the female employees say they felt uncomfortable around you. They complain of how you stare at them. Then, finally, we have reports of a strong smell of alcohol on your breath, especially when you work evening shifts."
Sleialgnion felt the lights switch off inside him. The fun, easy, interesting job was ending, being slaughtered right before him, here, in this dark closet where the "meeting" was being conducted.
They were desperate now, and the sight and sound of this was repulsive to witness. He felt like an outpost of the irreal. They could find nothing wrong with him, no reason to slice, but they were trying to invent some fictional dysfunction and paste it onto his work behavior.
"I'm a happily married man, with a dog kennel behind the garage, and a huge library of paper books. I have no reason to gawk or otherwise lollygag around females who are not my wife, which is basically all females, except one."
He was getting, as usual, all tangled up in an inarticulated mess of words awakened out of their busy sleep.
"All we're saying", the management team continued, oblivious to facts or logic, "is that we need to see some improvement in this area, even if you have to try to avoid the women in the other departments, or else we'll have to determine what to do next."
Sleialgnion wanted to laugh, but refrained, with a discreet and gentlemanly finesse, from doing so. He remembered the heroism of the stoic non-confidante stance. You divulge nothing and absorb nothing that the opponent says. It bounces off like ping pong balls hitting a solid brass wall at 100 miles per hour.
"Check", he replied in his enigmatic manner. ("...mate!" he was thinking in the back of his mind.)
He was always happier when a job ended than when it began, though he like to work. He like very much to work. He like doing it, work, very radically much. Now he was going to be harder, braver, smarter.
He decided to get signed affadavits from each girl-type person in the company, sealed and notarized by a justice of the peace with halo and wings, that he was not staring, had not stared, and did not plan to ever stare, at them.
Yes. The plan seemed right and foolproof.