In 1985 I was working at a car dealership in San Francisco. I was 24 at the time and the sales manager was an “Alpha Male” type whose main source of disrespect for me was that I was a male in a woman’s department. I tracked the vehicle inventory for the dealership, and it was the largest dealership in the Western U.S. at the time.1
Being as young as I was, and unsure of my stature and masculinity, I spent a great deal of personal capital on trying to gain his respect. It was an uphill battle. He was swarthy and a weightlifter, while I was pale and even though I had been in good shape from working physical jobs such as line cooking and working on the highway crews before moving to California, I became a bit pudgy working a desk job. And I have never been a dedicated follower of fashion so I didn’t dress as well as he expected that Real Men should.
In the 1980’s, automatic drip coffeemakers were relatively new. And for the longest time the only one in the building was kept downstairs in the new car receiving area. It was a long walk for morning coffee. My manager, a dear woman, sna2gged funds from the account to purchase a Mr. Coffee for our department.
When I made coffee one day, in taking the pot to the men’s room to fill it with water from the sink faucet, I thought about how slowly the coffee maker takes to drip and coffee makers did not have the pause and serve feature that the do now. So, I thought out of the box. That’s what we’re supposed to do in business, you know. There was a fountain in the haul with a water heater built in. This was handy for making tea or ramen. So, I used that water instead of the cold water from the faucet. And it sped up the coffee making by several minutes.
I shared my discovery with the rest of the office, and it became the new standard practice for making coffee.
So, one day, Mr. Macho sales manager observes my co-worker Linda using the hot water to make the coffee and decides that it’s time for a Man to step in and explain what “everybody knows.” He asks her why she’s using hot water rather than cold, and she tells him that I told her that it works better with hot water. And he laughs back to say “Why do you listen to Mike? Does he wear a skirt? Everyone knows that you have to start with cold water.” I didn’t know how to counter this, and rather than asking him if he wears a skirt which would make him a better authority than I was, I just lifted my leg up and pulled on my pants leg to let him know I was in on his sexist joke.
I was embarrassed about this later, as I should have backed up my friend Linda. She was my first black co-worker, and we got along great. She helped me unlearn much of the impressions I had of black women growing up in a town where there had only been one black woman in my lifetime. She didn’t fit any of the stereotypes, and even though she was a Raiders fan, being from Oakland3, we got along great.
I thought about this incident several years later, and decided that I wanted to find out why it was a rule to to start boiling water from cold. It seems to me to be more efficient to use water that’s hot from the water heater which heats water in larger volumes, than in a small volume in a coffee maker or a pot of water for boiling pasta. Even though a kilocalorie is needed to raise the temperature 1 degree celsius whether it’s in a pot, a coffee maker, or a water heater boiler, more of the heat energy escapes than from an insulated water heater. Whether the water heater is a tank or a tankless version, one can touch the exterior without being burned. The burn you get from touching a boiling pot of water, or the exterior surface of a coffeemaker, is energy escaping from the process that doesn’t raise the temperature of the water. It heats the air and whatever else it contacts around the pot or the coffeemaker.
So, many years later, I looked into the reason that common sense dictated we start with cold water. And this is what I found.
Lead pipes were very common in household plumbing for most of the time we’ve had indoor plumbing. But lead is dangerous because if it gets into the water we drink, and if this continues for long enough that it builds up, lead poisoning will have deleterious effects. It’s less likely to be siphoned off into cold water than hot water, and that’s the reasoning behind starting with cold water when boiling for human consumption.
The boiler tank on that water fountain streamed to the faucet through copper piping, which is not poisonous to humans for consumption. The sales manager didn’t know the reason for using cold water, and he never questioned it. The water from that copper pipe was just as safe as the cold water in the fountain that we were using to drink and sometimes fill the coffee caraffe.
I wrote this for two reasons.
To illustrate an example of how gender and sexism have affected the way that men and women interact. His statement that “I don’t wear a skirt” emphasized that making coffee is a woman’s domain and that as a male, I was not an expert.
That those truisms that we accept on a day-to-day basis should always be open for examination, on where they come from and why. More importantly, we need to be open to the fact that they are “not valid.”
The statement that “Transwomen are women” is fast becoming a truism, isn’t it?
Challenge it without worrying that you’ll be questioned on it. Demand that those who say it explain why. I don’t think many people do. It’s a claim that needs to be toppled as pointedly as a statue of Stalin, or Saddam Hussein.
Recently a transactivist attacked a gender critical women, in Aberdeen, Scotland. She suffered pain and visible bruises on her arm from the attack. The police say they investigated on the scene to determine she had suffered no harm. They considered it the end of the matter, until woman protested and demanded that the attacker be charged. Police Scotland issued a “Caution.” Really. Not even so much more than a yellow card. It has no effect on his criminal record. He paid no penalty for his crime, even though the police have made noises in the UK that they will tolerate no violence by men against women.
But, since she questions the truism of TWAW, she apparently deserves her punishment. That should be enough for anyone to question, skeptically, whether this truism is truthy or true. I don’t even find it truthy. It’s as absurd as the idea that God made a son to die on the cross and rise on the 3rd day so that I could go to Heaven if I so chose. It’s as absurd as the idea of whether or not only those who wear skirts know the proper way to make coffee.
Just question what you believe to be true. It’s probably not.
You don’t need to start boiling water from cold, thanks to modern plumbing. Men know how to make coffee, skirt or no. Transwomen aren’t women.
This was based on a count that included hundreds of cars that were fleet drop-ships to other dealerships. For example, Hertz rental and McKesson Drug, ordered cars through our fleet managers because of a law that mandated that all new car sales go through a dealership. All we did was to process invoices for those companies, but we never actually saw them directly. It was a small profit, but low cost and high volume situation and allowed our marketing to brag about the dealership size.
The Sales Department often liked to remind us that we were not a profit center, and as such, implied that we were freeloaders on their labor. I could write a whole essay on this, but I can count how many times that a salesman reminded me that “without me doing my job, you wouldn’t have a job.” Never mind that the sales department had a much higher turnover rate than the Contracts Department. But, as I said it was traditionally a woman’s department so they felt it necessary to talk down to us. Without us, they wouldn’t get commissions for their work.
As a Minnesota Vikings fan, it still burns me that they never won a Super Bowl game in 4 tries. But the Raiders embarrassed the Vikings and they were one of those teams that I hated for a long time. The others, of course, were the Chiefs, the Dolphins, the Steelers and the fucking Cowboys.
I was at the Coliseum in Los Angeles when Jack Del Rio and the Vikings destroyed my Raiders and dashed hope for post season play. I’ve never gotten over that, so I guess I understand your pain.
Great story Mike
Car dealership in the 80s, I can picture it now!