Plot
Michael Scott's (Steve Carell) "best friend forever" Todd Packer (David Koechner) offends the staff with crude gossip about an upper management scandal. Toby Flenderson (Paul Lieberstein) informs Michael that he will conduct a review of the company's sexual harassment policies because the CFO resigned after allegations made by his secretary. Michael's indignation that this will put a damper on his easygoing office environment rises to outrage when he learns that the corporate headquarters is sending down a lawyer to talk to him. Michael and the warehouse staff mock the sexual harassment video, but the crude remarks come to a screeching halt when Jan Levenson (Melora Hardin) and the lawyer arrive from Corporate.
While Michael angrily announces that he can no longer be friends with his staff and that he will never tell another joke again, Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) goads Michael into breaking his vow immediately, to the approval of Packer. Michael's attitude suddenly changes when he realizes that he is not in trouble, and that the lawyer's job is to protect him. After Packer tells a crude joke at the expense of Phyllis, Michael defends her, telling the entire office that he finds Phyllis attractive and that the only thing he worries about when he's near her "is getting a boner".
Meanwhile, Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) waits with anticipation for her mother (Shannon Cochran) to arrive from out of town. Pam's mother arrives and asks in whispers (shushed by an embarrassed Pam) "which one is Jim?" Michael stops Packer when he tries to share another inappropriate joke and concludes with his misguided thoughts on sexual harassment.
Read more about this topic: Sexual Harassment (The Office)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)