Headline of the Week
Abby Humphreys

Features

Headline of the Week

Weekly, the Racer X Slack thread is filled with great headlines from newspapers around the globe. So, we’ve decided to make it a weekly feature here on Exhaust.

If dogs pee on things to establish dominance, what do humans do? Forget yelling or fighting—apparently, they fart in people’s personal space and pinch the nipples of their subordinates.

According to the Sacramento Bee, Brett Bland, a car salesman in Texas, is suing Jeremy Pratt—his former boss—and AutoNation, the parent company of the dealership where he works, for creating a “sexually hostile” workplace environment that included Pratt “regularly entering [employees’] enclosed offices, intentionally passing gas, and then laughing as they were forced to breathe soiled air.” Behavior also reportedly included nipple-pinching, posting flyers around the office stating Bland was a “cancer,” and creating some nasty text chains—one of which included portraying Bland as a sex offender to other workers.

The lawsuit claims that Pratt made another employee at the company doctor a photo of Bland to look like a mugshot. Pratt texted the photo to several other workers at the company, saying, “You are receiving this because there may be a risk of sex offender activity in your area.” Bland was included in the text chain, so he was able to see his coworkers’ reactions to the message, which (as you may guess) were not so friendly: One employee replied that he “was wondering why [Bland] kept asking if I had any pictures of my nieces or nephews.”

The Bee reports Pratt was eventually fired after the incident, but continued to visit the dealership and bully employees during working hours. Many employees claimed they complained to AutoNation’s human resources department about Pratt’s conduct both before and after the firing, but no action was taken to curtail his behavior; in fact, Pratt told others he had upper management “wrapped around his finger” at one point after learning of the complaints made against him.

Despite all of this, Bland is mostly concerned for the security of his job. After the doctored photo incident and Pratt’s subsequent firing, Bland's lawsuit claims that a new policy that required Bland to sell at least eight cars per month was put in place by AutoNation. Bland feels that this was in retaliation to Pratt’s firing, and what’s more, Pratt somehow knew about it—he sent text messages mentioning the policy to Bland and “taunting” him with it, even though it was confidential information and he’d already left the company by that point. AutoNation eventually redacted the policy, but the lawsuit states Bland fears that it will be reenacted “after enough time passes to overcome the appearance of retaliation.”

Next time you have an issue with a boss or coworker, take a deep breath of fresh, fart-free air and feel your pain-free nipples… Or maybe don’t do that and just realize things could be a lot worse. Here’s what this crazy headline would look like in print: