My new favorite hobby is weaponizing my Mom Friend status against my male coworkers, of which there are a surplus because I am A Woman in The Trades. It's hilarious to me. I have been the Mom Friend my entire life and working construction means I've expanded my territory from Mom Friend to Site Mom by virtue of always knowing where things are and also having pain meds and general life advice if you need any. Do you know what happens when you are so aggressively mom-shaped despite not even being 30? All the young guys I work with have subconsciously put me in the mom category of their brains. Do you know what that means? I live and work in the American South. These guys have been raised both socially and culturally to Respect All Mom Figures and I've snuck myself into that classification like a cuckoo in the nest. Like, listen, I can take it and dish it out with the best of them and I'm "one of the guys" 97% of the time, but I have my limits. If they're being dicks to each other and I'm tired of it all I gotta do is look really disapproving and scold them with some classic Mom-isms and it will stop them dead in their tracks. It's a total short circuit of their brains. Not one of these guys has withstood my telling them "manners are free and it costs nothing to be kind." Sometimes I just give them a look and say "Really?" in that tone of voice all moms use when they're completely fed up with you and it makes them straighten up in 10 seconds flat, guaranteed. It's psychological warfare of the highest order. One time I jokingly pulled out a "I'm so disappointed in you" after hearing this barely 18 year old tell some story about being obnoxious in an online game voice chat and it was very obviously a joke but somehow it rattled him so much AT WORK that he later told me he stopped doing it. It's a perfect storm of factors and literally all of them are in my favor. Should I care more about not enforcing gender stereotypes, especially in such a male-dominated field? Probably, but let's be real, the power has completely gone to my head.
To be fair, it's not just the young guys I'm devestating in single blows, I just have to bank hard on my gender and the expectation of how a lady should be treated with the old guys. Again, it's the American South, this shit is literally so easy to use to my advantage that I don't even have to try. Like, whenever a Grouchy Old Man gets testy about us young folks being "soft" and they go on a rant about the kids these days and how easy we have it? When these guys with 40 years of experience tell me about how we wouldn't have lasted a minute in the field back then? Because when they were my age they were getting screamed at by their bosses, and tools were thrown at them when they made a mistake, and they'd get insulted day in and out until they either quit or learned? I refuse to feed into that mindset and sidestep the entire point they're trying to make by addressing... Their Feelings. Instant kill shot. I have straight up looked one of these crochety old men dead in the eyes and said "I'm so sorry that happened to you, you didn't deserve to be treated like that just because you didn't know something that nobody ever taught you" and I got to watch his brain run directly into a brick wall. Like, yes, it's heartbreaking to really think about it, but also it took exactly one sentence for me to make the guy who chronically hates every clueless new apprentice stare at me with his jaw dropped while his brain visibly rebooted from the worldview earthquake I just dished out. If a guy said that to him he'd have blown up and cussed him out, but ahahaha! I am not a guy! Women get to have emotions and they can both express and validate them! You can't cuss out a woman like that! I'm "one of the guys" until the script breaks and then they're too busy experiencing a 404 error trying to reconcile their immediate response into something they think is socially acceptable to say to a woman, and meanwhile they can't get away from what I just said to them. Zero ways to exit that conversation quick enough to avoid it. He's going to be thinking about it all morning and I know he is because he's being weirdly mellow and explaining things better to the green helpers. Well, until they ask him another stupid question that is, then he's back to normal. I'm not a miracle worker.
