He Told Me to Sit On His Lap and Punish Him

I was speechless and powerless

“Whatcha gonna do? Sit on my lap and punish me?”

Leaning back casually, he jeers at me from his seat in the dog house — an oil and gas term for the “command center” on site.

He’s a heavy-set man. At least 6 feet tall and north of 200 pounds with his beer belly jutting out. His once red coveralls are splattered in oil, grease, and other hydrocarbon products.

The overall effect is reminiscent of a perversely distorted clean-shaven Santa Claus.

I stand frozen in place near the entrance of the dog house — half in, half out. I know my eyes have gone wide. I know I should respond and say something witty or sassy in retort.

But I’m speechless.

It’s my first time at site without an entourage of fellow engineers. Freshly out of school, I no longer have the protection of an intern.

Now I’m expected to be “the engineer”.

Instead of passively trailing along, I’m expected to play a leading role in project scope and decision-making. I’m to view things with a critical eye — to understand the bigger picture economic impacts, assess the technical risks, and be mindful of opportunities for improvement.

It’s big shoes to fill and I’m thankful I don’t have to do it alone. There’s another engineer with me. We’d graduated at the same time and had even interned together. We weren’t really friends, but we were friendly enough.

He’s tall, slender, and blonde. With his oversized glasses and outdated style of clothing, he looks and acts every part the stereotypical engineer found on Big Bang Theory. But he’s calm and collected, confident in his understanding of the task at hand and sure of his calculations.

In contrast, I’m short, petite, and Asian. My coveralls — too clean and too blue — bunch at my feet; I look like a kid dressed in her father’s work clothes. Radiating nerves and uncertainty, I give myself a mental pep talk but my body language betrays me.

We make for an interesting duo when we arrive at site.

At first, we’re mostly ignored.

Viewed as pesky city slickers who will only get in the way, we’re not exactly welcomed with open arms. But our titles as engineers mean our presence is at least tolerated.

The supervisor takes us on a tour of the operations. He warns us not to accidentally step on any emergency shutdown lines or stand too close as they’re lifting and hoisting. We observe them troubleshoot a failed pressure test and he chuckles, jadedly pointing out that a line in the engineer’s instructions can take hours in reality to execute.

Slowly, the frosty reception we receive thaws. We show up each morning with donuts as a peace offering for our presence. We reassure them we’re here to learn, not to tell them how to do their jobs.

“Ran into some issues downhole. Gonna take us a while to work through it — might even take a couple of days, but hey, we’ve got time to just sit here, right?”

The supervisor says this to us casually, setting down his radio after the latest update from his crew. He says it so nonchalantly that it takes me a beat to register the implications; my fellow engineer is faster than I am.

“Wait — what do you mean? We don’t have time. We’ll go over budget! Allison, tell him.”

As he says my name, it’s the jump start my brain needs. In a show of support, I chime in.

“We only have $1.5 million for this job. Isn’t our burn rate $100k a day? I guess I could ask for a cost overrun if it’s necessary but are we … really just going to sit here and wait?”

Leaning back casually as if amused with our objections, he jeers at me.

“Whatcha gonna do? Sit on my lap and punish me?”

I’m speechless. The other engineer is speechless.

I know I should respond and say something, but I don’t know what. I want to be sassy and witty — to smartly put him in his place and dance the delicate line between acceptance and respect, but I have no words.

When neither of us responds back to him, he scratches his chin, sighs, and grabs his radio again.

“Yeah, I guess we can try a few things. Boys, let’s pressure her up one more time.”

To this day, the other engineer and I have never talked about this incident. It bonded us, but neither of us ever felt the need to bring it again up.

We both thought we knew what we were getting into. But you never really grasp the culture of a place till you’re too deep in to get out.

For him, it was the stark realization of the added challenges women face. The insult wasn’t even targeted at him; though he voiced the initial objection, it was me as his female counterpart that received the lewd invitation and challenge. But he found himself just as powerless as I was.

For me, it was a shattering of innocence — a brush against the realities of entering the oil and gas world. I’d received so many pats on the back for ‘making it’ as an engineer; I naively thought the only challenge to overcome was a matter of book smarts and brains.

To be honest, I can’t even remember if we finished this job on budget or on schedule. I don’t recall any stern reprimands from my manager but time has a way of sifting molehills from mountains. Molehills are eroded back to their true selves but the sharp mountain peaks make their marks and leave their scars.

What has stayed with me through the years is the stark lesson that carving your place as a woman in a male-dominated field can be a thousand times harder than anything in the textbooks.

This moment was a turning point for me. It was the beginning of the end for this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new grad.

His words laid me bare and I felt vulnerable, weak, and powerless. I thought I was strong and quick-witted; he proved me otherwise. In a few casual words, he’d reduced me to yet another statistic of unreported sexual harassment.

He served the poison from the well and forced the first sips down my throat.

It challenged me seductively, asking if I was strong enough to handle it. It promised me that there would be more to come and asked if this was still the path I wanted to take. It gestured to the exit, reminding me that I could leave if I wanted to; it’ll only cost me everything I’d work for up until that point.

I let the poison do its work. Reluctantly, hesitantly, I accept the slow death that it offers — too stubborn to fold and too weak to leave …