Inappropriate

As I have mentioned here before as well as in Scattershots, I look significantly younger than I actually am. This has always been the case with me, and indeed for most of my family members. My mom honestly looks like she had me in high school or shortly after and my dad doesn't look like a guy who personally knew Moses. (In fact, my dad's youngest brother once punched him in the back at a baseball game because my dad, the oldest brother, had been carded when purchasing beer while his six-years-younger brother wasn't.) I'm getting on to thirty these days so I don't look quite as aggressively young as I once did, but I definitely don't look my age either. Depending on what I wear and how I fix my hair and makeup, some days I really don't look like I could be out of high school.

When I actually was young, I used to really hate being mistaken for someone three or four years younger, but the further from my teen years I get, the better I feel about looking as young as I do. It has certain advantages and disadvantages. People feel the need to explain things to me that they think were before my time when they were a staple of my childhood, like video rentals and floppy discs (incidentally, I remember real floppy discs--the five-inch ones with the cardboard cover that actually were floppy and flexible and to this day refer to the hard plastic 'floppies' as 'hard discs). Looking so fresh-faced and sweetly innocent is quite an attractive trait to most people so I never have any shortage of people with whom I can shamelessly flirt.

This is, again, a true story of something that happened some years ago. Some days I think I should write a memoir or something, except I would probably end up accused of making shit up like the guy who wrote 'A Million Little Pieces'.

One thing I use my youthful appearance for is to fend off pickup artists when I just don't really want to deal with them. You can't do this in bars, obviously, but you can do it pretty much anywhere else there are people making unwelcome, inappropriate, obnoxious sexual advances. The words 'I'm sixteen' work wonders to make a man suddenly lose interest. Like most women, I used to try and discourage these guys by saying I was in a relationship or a lesbian, but I find men of this particular breed aren't put off by such claims--after all, just because you're taken or not into guys doesn't mean he can't tempt you away from your mate or convert you to heterosexuality with a good deep dicking. No, in my experience the best way to discourage these assholes is to make them think that they could go to jail for sticking it in you. Regardless of your area's age of consent laws, most men over the age of twenty are extremely wary of pursuing any girl who is under the age of eighteen for fear of reverberating negative consequences. So for many years now, my primary method of saying 'fuck off!!' without actually using those exact words is to just say I'm sixteen. 90% of the time it works.

But this isn't a story about the 90% of the time when it works.

I was walking a dog one morning several years ago--it was summer and early morning, so all the weekday commuters had left for the day but none of the kids would be up for hours yet, meaning the neighbourhood was pretty well completely deserted. The only other person about was a gentlemen probably in his late 20s driving an advertising van for a lawn care/pest control company and hanging advertisements on doorknobs. He'd drive eight or ten houses down the road, get out of the van, leave his shit at the eight or ten houses, and then go back to the van and repeat the process again with the next eight or ten, so we were pretty much going the same speed on opposite sides of the road. He tried to chat me up and since I don't really feel like an actual human being that early in the morning, I didn't want to deal with it. So I didn't.

"Uhm, I'm sixteen," I told him.

"Oh, shiiii--! Sorry, I didn't know!"

And I thought that was the end of it, and he didn't try talking to me again. For about three minutes. Then he started back up, trying to chat me up and asking me whether I lived there and where my house was and where I went to school and what my name was--really asking a lot of personal questions that aren't really appropriate to ask a complete stranger.

When he teasingly asked, "What, you can't talk to me or anything? Come on, girl, where's the harm?", I began to get a little worried because of the sheer amount of confident comfort with which he was talking to someone he believed was an underage girl. The fact that he was still talking in the first place wasn't as worrisome as the fact that he was doing it so casually and with an evident amount of comfort. Clearly this was a man who felt right at home having a borderline-inappropriate conversation with a teenager, and that bothered me.

So I quick wrote down the number of his license plate on my hand.

I ducked into a friend's yard when he wasn't looking to hide from him until he left--then I went home and immediately got on my computer to look up the company website for their customer service number.

Now, I should explain something--at the time I definitely wasn't in any way underage. I was 21. People always seem to think that if it turns out later the person was lying about their age and turns out to be an undercover cop or someone like me trying to ditch a pickup artist, the actions are excusable because they weren't hitting on an underage kid at all. That's not how the law works. This man did not know me personally. He had no way of knowing anything about me that I didn't tell him, no way of knowing how old I really was. All he had to go on was what I said, and what I said was that I was sixteen years old. As far as he was aware, I was sixteen years old, full stop. This makes what he did potentially illegal--at the very least, it makes him skeevy. He had no reason to assume I was anything but sixteen years old. He persisted in talking to me in a personal manner, trying to learn where I lived or where I went to school.

Not. Freaking. Cool.

Anyway, I got the number for the company for which he worked. I expected I was just going to have to call and leave a message on a machine or something, but to my surprise a very perky customer service agent answered the phone to take my complaint. And, while I look extremely young, I actually have a rather 'mature' voice. I have a fairly deep voice, at least for a girl, and even sound so indistinguishable from my own mother that people have mistaken us for one another talking from one room to another in the house. So it was very easy for me to assume a new role--that of an upset mother.

I think the girl I talked to was named either Kelly or Jenny. I wish I remembered because she was awfully upset about the whole business--she genuinely seemed so distraught that I would really have liked a way to reach her again to tell her that there was never an underage child in any danger and she didn't have to panic.

Anyway. I adopted the worried but firm voice of a frightened and upset mother and explained to Kelly/Jenny that my sixteen-year-old daughter had been walking the dog that morning and encountered the driver of one of their company vans with an ABC-123 tag number. I described the driver to her, since I didn't get his name--I told Kelly/Jenny it was because my daughter had followed all the 'Don't Talk to Strangers' teaching and tried her best not to talk to a man she didn't know and was obviously trying to earn her trust. I emphasized that my 'daughter' had immediately and definitively told the man that she was sixteen years old and that his efforts to pick her up continued despite this until she hid in a friend's yard.

Kelly/Jenny was silent for a few minutes and I could hear her click-click-clacking away on her keyboard before she then began to apologize profusely on behalf of a company she answered phones for.

"Oh my gosh, ma'am, I am so sorry this happened to you! Is she okay? Is she scared? This is horrible, I don't know how to begin to apologize for what you and your child have been through today! I promise you, this report is being marked urgent and will be dealt with as soon as possible!"

I assured her my 'daughter' was a tough girl and we lived in an otherwise safe area, but that I felt I saw some red flags in the fact that the man had been so persistent and seemed not to have any qualms talking to an underage girl. Kelly/Jenny agreed. She offered to let me leave my name and number, but since I was being less than honest about the whole business I decided it was best if I just lodged the complain anonymously.

"Oh, I don't think so," I said. "I'm not really worried at all, but I still don't want to take any chances and risk some potential retaliatory backlash or something if he somehow finds through the complaint who we are."

"I understand completely. I apologize on behalf of [company]. I hope this incident hasn't soured your opinion of us."

I assured her it hadn't, that the actions of one minor employee didn't represent the habits of an entire business, and then we ended the call.

Because I couldn't reasonably leave contact info with the company, there was no way for me to get a follow-up of any kind. I couldn't call the company back and inquire about it, either, since no company in its right mind would share these kinds of complaints to anyone who couldn't prove they were directly involved. Kelly/Jenny's horror and guilt obviously don't represent the feelings of the company as a whole any more than the driver's did, but I this is the kind of thing a big name like that simply won't stand for in their ranks. If that man wasn't immediately fired from his job over the incident, he was most certainly severely reprimanded. Deep down, I kinda wish he was fired. His demeanor seriously rubbed me the wrong way.

Naturally, even if he was fired from the job that doesn't mean he learned his lesson (companies aren't required to give you any reasons for your termination, after all, so he might not even have been aware that a complaint had been lodged against him). And even if he is aware that his superiors knew what he'd done, that's no guarantee he was going to stop. Just that, if he's inclined to keep doing it, he'll be sneakier about it.

If there was someone after me, I hope she had the guts to speak up.

That's another perk of looking younger than I do--it means I am often faced with scenarios mostly associated with young people, treated like a teenager, but have the benefit of experience and the kind of 'not-standing-for-this-shit' attitude that comes with time. It means I have the ability to face a teenager's problem as an adult.

It means I know better.

More than that, it means I know other people should know better, too.