Drill Me!

If you didn’t catch your local news last week, you probably missed out on the best story of 2012 – a male dentist was allowed to fire his female assistant because he was afraid he might one day have an affair with her.

Yeah. You read that right.

The Iowa State Supreme Court upheld a 2011 decision that this dentist acted within the law when he fired his assistant for being “irresistible”. The assistant, Melissa Nelson, who had been working for Dr. James Knight since 1999, was fired in January 2010 because she posed a threat to his marriage.

Now I realize that a “dentist” in Iowa is quite the catch – the equivalent of a Nobel Prize winning, billionaire philanthropist anywhere else, but are you kidding me?

So here’s how it went down. This dentist and assistant worked together and did a good deal of flirting, or what passes for flirting in Iowa and doesn’t involve livestock. He was a smooth talking ladies’ man; a Renaissance man, who offered her business tips like “if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing”.

Yeah. I think he also told her “If this van’s a rocking, don’t come a knocking”.

When she would complain about her married sex life, he would offer compassion and words of encouragement like “That’s like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it”.  To be honest, I’m impressed that he knew what a Lamborghini was; most people in Iowa think it’s a type of squash.

Now, I guess the dentist’s wife got wind of this because she happened to read some of the texts that her husband, Dr. Stud Muffin III, had received from the home-wrecking dental assistant. When the dentist returned home from the gym, she confronted him.

So being the religious people that they are, the dentist and his wife consulted their pastor, because when it comes to lust, marriage, and real-world relationships, there’s just no beating a pastor for sound advice.  After speaking with the couple, the pastor told the dentist that it would be in the best interest of himself, his wife, and his marriage, to “fire the bitch”. Or words to that effect.

So the dentist went back and told his assistant that if he didn’t fire her, sometime down the road they would be having an affair, and that would not be a good thing for either of them.

And that was that.

Now, to be fair, the assistant claims she never thought of the dentist as more than a father-figure, but based on the texts she was sending him, one might have to wonder in which prison HER father currently resides. But still, this is what passes for real-life in Iowa.

The Iowa Supreme Court, which is all male by the way, held that the dentist violated no laws. As long as she was not fired for any of the big offenses like racial or gender discrimination, the whole thing was kosher. In fact the Court said, “Such firings may be unfair, but they are not unlawful discrimination under the Iowa Civil Rights Act because they are motivated by feelings and emotions, not gender….”

So ladies, if you’re thinking of moving to Iowa, you better get out the burka because the men in Iowa are not responsible for their actions as the little head appears to be driving the proverbial clown car.

Thank goodness for honest, God-fearing, good-hearted people like Dr. James Knight, DDS, and his wife. Rather than addressing their own marriage issues, and the fact that the good doctor can’t seem to keep it in his pants, he fires a good, and mostly blameless employee, an employee that the good doctor described as a “stellar worker”, although in hindsight he may have meant that she had a heavenly body, or that somehow Uranus was involved.

I certainly hope she sues him for sexual harassment, his wife leaves him, and his dental practice dries up; because as the good pastor forgot to remind him, “Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for His wrath” and of course my personal favorite, “Vengeance is Mine”.