Umm. Wait what?

So I'm going to go out on a very steady limb and assume that Big Dongles are a joke about penises, which if I recall correctly are male genitalia.

I don't really see the problem. Were they making it to each other or to potential clients? It seemed like it was to each other, like they had sort of a slower part of the day and were friends or just friendly or something and big dongles was this office in-joke or something, then someone happened to overhear them.

Wait are dick jokes sexual harassment? Are we, as a culture, so ashamed of a fleshy tube between our legs that mentioning it in a public space gets two people fired? Is there some other reason dick jokes are offensive? I mean, I wasn't there, I don't know the exact joke, but it sounds like exactly the kind of joke you make when you sort of like your job.

I'm really trying to understand what she got offended about. Yeah, the code of conduct prohibits sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes I guess (PyCon is what again?), but are dick jokes any of those?

I can't actually think of a dick joke that's somehow any of those, except...I mean I guess it's exclusionary because biological women don't have penises? Wait, what about trans* women?

What it sounds like is that a woman at a conference got personally offended by a joke that was relatively non-offensive (again, haven't heard the joke, can't tell), and made a show out of it, because she thought it was the right thing to do. Except she apparently didn't put a lot of thought in to what was right or wrong in the situation, and just went ahead and got a dude fired because of a joke.

Part of growing up is understanding that sometimes people will say things that you find personally offensive and that its their right to say it. Its recognizing that going behind people's backs to "defend" a group of people isn't actually going to help anything; problems need to be dealt with directly, not by calling higher authorities to solve the problem for you. Beyond both of those, however, its recognizing that life is not clean and sanitary, and people are going to hold views that might actually be hideously offensive to you, and that simply because they have these viewpoints, it doesn't actually make them a bad person and it certainly doesn't make you capable of determining their career.

There are customers who come in to my store every day who are incredibly racist. On 9/11/2012, there was a man in a blue jeans vest with a patch that said "All I needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11." I was dead silent the whole time serving him because that's blatantly racist and blatantly ignorant. What I didn't do was call my manager out to handle him because I can't possibly make that decision. What if its a joke? I don't know. It might be? Maybe its an old patch he forgot about, maybe a million different things.

When people offend you in these ultimately very minor ways, by saying things, usually the best course of action is to just leave. They aren't plotting a genocide, they're not molesting people, they're making jokes. Sometimes people make jokes. Its a thing that happens, and until the world begins revolving around a central morality its nothing to be offended about.