Flirting & being cheeky in the workplace

[Phoebe]

I quit a job I hated about three months ago now and started working in a warehouse. One of the reasons I like my new job is because at the moment it's small (1 absent woman and 2 men working there, plus another guy pops down once a week), friendly & fairly relaxed. I was at the point where I thought I was on a really friendly basis with all the guys (met the woman twice for about 10 minutes each). Now I'm English & I'm over here in the States and every now and then I'll use a phrase or word that doesn't cross over and I have to explain what it means. This lunchtime the word cheeky had come up, and I explained that I was cheeky. Cheeky meaning that you come just short of being rude (offensive not sexual) when you make a joke. My boss was telling me that I had to be careful who I was cheeky around because they could take it for being rude. I tried to explain that being cheeky is getting away with it, so you have to know/guess what the limits of the person you're talking to are. If the other person takes offense then you've just been rude, not cheeky (normally helps if you using a joking tone and smile a lot - you get away with it because the other person knows that you don't mean it).

 

Anyway the other guy had left the kitchen, my boss was on his way out still warning me about being careful. I told him that he'd always seemed to find it funny before, so in a way he'd been encouraging me. To which he replied that he'd misunderstood what I meant. I took that to mean that he thought I'd been flirting with him, which explains the periodic comments about how he wouldn't cheat on his wife and how you don't mess around in your own backyard etc. I'm starting to wonder now if the other guys that I've been friendly and worked with think that I'm with them flirting too. The kind of jokes I make are on the same level as the ones I'd tell my female co-workers in the past, absolutely nothing sexual about them. I'm concerned that as the business grows and the workforce will be primarily male that I'm going to get labeled as a flirt, while when I was working mainly with women I was just labeled cheeky! I've never thought of myself as a flirt, in fact if I intentionally tried to flirt I don't think I'd know where to start or be too embarassed to.

 

Am I over-reacting? Reading too much into it? Is it possible to be cheeky to a guy and not be thought of as flirting?

[Trialbyfire]

You have to decide what role you want to play at work. Do you want to be the fun party girl who will remain where she's been hired or do you want to be perceived as an upwardly mobile serious employee? Of course there's middle ground between these two extreme positions but I think you understand what I mean.

 

Sad to say but women who want to fast-track to management have to sometimes suppress a portion of their sense of humour and fun.