CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Harassment
I started an apprenticeship after high school to gain some work experience. I worked in a postroom for a large company. The company was based locally with a few buildings located in the town centre. To save extra costs, they used internal porters to transport the post between buildings.
I worked in the Town Hall which, as you can imagine, was a very old building and was not an open space office, as all the other buildings were. My colleagues were a lot older than me — in their fifties — except for one who was a year or two older than me. I am a heterosexual female and [Colleague] was a gay male.
The building had CCTV in the corridors only, so the room [Colleague] and I worked in did not have any CCTV at all. Sometimes we were alone working in that room whilst the others did the external post in the other office. The older colleagues had a separate office from us as they held more senior roles.
We had one porter who would do the afternoon post run. He was fairly new to the job, was a similar age to my other colleagues, was quite overweight, and always had a funny smell about him. He would always flirt with the older colleagues and wander into their office first whilst collecting the post.
During a quiet shift, [Colleague] came up to me and said that the porter flirted with him and touched him inappropriately when collecting post and he felt uncomfortable. I thought he was joking, as that was the sort of person he was. I would leave the post bags on the countertop for collection and work from the other office, so I never really saw or spoke to the porters. This particular porter, however, insisted that someone physically hand him the post. My naive young mind never thought anything of this. Maybe he couldn’t find the large, brightly-coloured bags? I’m not sure.
I was working in that office myself one week as internal post was extremely busy. The porter came in and started making small talk whilst I bagged the post. What I didn’t realise was that he kept getting closer and making sexual jokes. I finished bagging the post and, before turning around, I felt something touch my bottom. I turned around ninety degrees with my back to the corner of the countertop. The porter moved his hand back but showed no sign of guilt or anything — just a creepy smile on his face. I quickly gave him the post and bolted out of there. I tried telling my older colleagues, but they dismissed this as a joke and said he was only being friendly and wouldn’t do that. After that, on a few other occasions, he came in and slapped me on my behind and squeezed which made me even more uncomfortable.
When I next saw [Colleague], I apologised and told him what had happened to me. The next day, we decided to work together in the office. The same porter came in again. We looked at each other with a “Now what?” sort of look. [Colleague] stood behind me whilst I bagged the post. But as it was a corner countertop, it looked like we were side by side. I turned to get the bags, my colleague turned to take them from me, and the porter decided this was the best time to press his whole body into [Colleague]’s back. His “joke” was, “Are we making a sandwich?”
We both stayed quiet as we were scared we would be in trouble if we said anything. It was our word against his.
The final straw came a week before Christmas. Everyone was sending Christmas cards internally so internal post wasn’t filled with much else and bags were very light. The porter came to collect the bags and complained to our colleagues that I was “hiding out” in the back office. [Colleague] was on lunch at the time.
This time, I decided to give him the bags in the corridor as they were extremely light. I made sure to stand slightly to the side, facing my back toward the camera so he would be facing the camera. He had his trolley with him and decided to bend down in front of me to put his bags in the trolley, made a nasty sexual gesture with his tongue and fingers, and inhaled.
In writing this, it sounds like it took longer than it did, but in reality, he was very quick about it. I wondered if it had happened or not. I was in shock. I was extremely grossed out and stepped back. At that moment, I felt like crying. Luckily for me, I knew there was CCTV there and he had been caught.
Once he left, I spoke to [Colleague] about this and we reported it to Human Resources, who asked if we wanted to take this further. Now I feel like I should have, but at the time, we were both younger and didn’t want to cause trouble as our older colleagues already doubted us. We felt like little kids in the office. In the end, the porter was fired and post was left in the room for pickup or an older colleague would deal with the porters.
