Mad Men

I've been torn between watching Mad Men and not watching. I want to watch it because I've heard about the great acting and writing. I didn't want to watch it because it was an era I grew up in. Even when I started working quite awhile after all the bra burning, men still treated women the same way. "Go get me a cup of coffee, Carla." The only change was they didn't say honey anymore and it was okay to fix myself a cup too. (I don't drink coffee.) I had one boss tell me it was okay for me to call him by his first name when I was in his office, but when others were around, I'm to call him Mr. LastName. We weren't allowed to wear pants, only skirts or dresses. Some of the women wore rather short skirts. Made filing in the bottom drawer interesting for the guys. Yes, people smoked in the office, but we weren't allowed to have sodas or food at the desk. No radios but there were piped in elevator music.

There are more subtle things that happened I won't get into, but as you can imagine it's not a way of life I would like to return to. Though for the last several years I thought all of that was behind me, I've had a few instances come up recently that prove chauvinistic attitudes at work are still alive and well in the U.S.