MRS Bernice Harris has asthma and high blood pressure, but you wouldn't know it if you called in for a snack at the Senate coffee shop where she has worked as, cashier for as long as people can remember.
The 58 year old African American from North Carolina, who has served in the Senate Russell building in various jobs since the time of President Johnson, doesn't complain much.
She has a smile and a cheery word for all her customers. She calls them "baby" or "honey", whether they be cleaners or senators or congressional reporters.
She what? Fire that woman immediately! Doesn't she know that such endearments are politically incorrect, that they amount to sexual harassment? She must be stopped.
That is what one young man working as a part time employee handling post for a Senator decided last week when Mrs Harris called him "baby".
Smouldering with outrage, Mr Christopher Held complained to his office manager that he felt sexually harassed. His boss recommended that he could talk the matter over with the cashier or take the case to the Senate Office for Fair Employment Practices or just let it go.
He chose to make an official complaint. The postal assistant (part time) gave Mrs Harris a letter saying he was reporting the matter not as a "racial thing" but because "the term that you quoted does make me real bothersome".
I call all my customers `babe'," Mrs Harris told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. "I treat people like I want my kids and grandkids and myself to be treated. I don't know his problem."
Ironically, Mr Held works for Republican Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, whose party delights in making fun of political correctness. The Republican Party has its own ideas of what is politically correct. Last week voted to lift a ban on assault weapons.
Conservative talk show hosts in the US like to ridicule champions of PC who dare to criticise terms and symbols which offend minorities like "Washington Redskins" or "Cleveland Indians".
In South Dakota, high school students don't shout "babe" when their basketball teams compete with opponents from the Lakota Indian reservation. They cry "dog eater", "squaw" or "dirty old Indians", according to a recent report in the Christian Science Monitor.
In Atlanta this week, where fans of the Atlanta Braves make tomahawk chops which Americans find offensive, there was another story of political correctness, Southern style. It also involved a "babe", though in this instance a real one.
The day old child of a mixed race couple was buried in a cemetery of a small Baptist church on Friday. Three days later the deacon of the Barnetts Creek Baptist Church told the parent's family that church leaders wanted the tiny coffin moved to another burial ground.
The church's cemetery was all white. Having a mixed blood interred there was religiously incorrect.
"He said they didn't allow half breeds in their cemetery" because it was a "one hundred per cent white cemetery" said the child's grandmother, Mrs Sylvia Leverett, who is white.
The deacon, Mr Logan Lewis, was quoted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution as saying, "There's not any mixing of cemeteries anywhere in this area. If someone white asked to be buried in a black cemetery, he'd be a laughing" stock."
Last year the Southern Baptist Convention apologised to blacks for "condoning and perpetuating individual and systematic racism." But officials from the national Baptist convention say they cannot take sanctions against the Barnetts Creek church, as strict rules protect the autonomy of its 40,000 congregations.
The US Congress has no say in such matters either. But its own strict rules meant that sanctions were taken against Mrs Bernice Harris. She was removed from her job and sent to a bigger cafeteria in Capitol Building.
The cashier told the Congress journal, Roll Call, that her employers were afraid she might use an unwanted endearment with the young man again and he would sue. She quit rather than take the transfer, even though it meant losing retirement benefits, She is proud as well as cheerful,
Republican Congressman Sony Bono, who made a lot of money singing "I've Got You, Babe" told the New York Times that people are so sensitive on gender issues these days he is afraid to make eye contact,
This story at least has a happy ending, Senators and staffers rallied around when they heard what happened, Flowers arrived from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Other senators dropped by to say how much they loved her calling them "babe" and "honey", She was given her job back.
Mr Held has become a national symbol of PC gone mad. Mrs Harris still calls the customers "babe", though she says she's trying to hold her tongue "in ease that young man comes back."