Laid Out in the Office

There was a time in my life when I was too naive to understand that some things are better left unsaid. I also mistakenly believed that my opinion could help other people, when the truth is that people tend to follow their passions—even when those passions are leading them directly toward disaster.

During this period, I had an office friend—or, more accurately, an acquaintance—named Harper*. We occasionally chatted at work. Keep in mind that all of this happened quite a long time ago, and some of the workplace behavior in this story, as appalling as it seems now, unfortunately wasn’t all that unusual at the time. I didn’t agree with it then, and I certainly don’t agree with it now.

More importantly, this experience is the reason I currently stay out of other people’s workplace relationships and recommend sending interpersonal disasters directly to HR.

Let’s begin.

It was a long winter, and I was working the night shift at a call center. My coworker Harper was goofy, socially awkward, and not particularly concerned with subtlety. She had developed an enormous crush on another coworker, Clark*, and she wanted absolutely everyone—including Clark—to know about it.

These days, Harper’s behavior could easily have resulted in a conversation with HR about sexual harassment. Back then, however, workplace boundaries could be considerably more lax, and Harper openly hit on Clark whenever she got the opportunity.

She particularly laid it on thick near the end of our shifts because Clark frequently needed a ride home. His driver’s license had been suspended after multiple DUIs, which was perhaps a clue that Clark himself was not exactly the grand prize in this romantic competition.

I certainly didn’t see the appeal, but then again, I wasn’t the one asking him out during the drive home every night.

Harper was.

At first, Clark laughed off her advances. Eventually, however, his amusement turned to annoyance, and his annoyance turned to anger. He finally stopped accepting rides from Harper and started riding home with me instead.

During those drives, Clark would vent about how frustrated he was that Harper refused to take the hint. He repeatedly asked me to pull her aside and explain that brushing her off did not mean he was playing hard to get.

For reasons I can only attribute to youthful stupidity and an inflated belief in my own diplomatic abilities, I agreed.

I tried gently explaining to Harper that Clark wasn’t interested in pursuing a relationship with her. Harper responded by essentially pretending she had no idea what I was talking about. She ignored the advice and continued pursuing Clark whenever the opportunity presented itself, apparently believing persistence would eventually wear him down.

It did not.

After one particularly bold attempt Harper made during a smoke break, Clark told me on the ride home that if she made another scene like that, he was going to embarrass her publicly.

Now I felt responsible for preventing an office catastrophe.

This was my second mistake.

At the beginning of our next shift, I took Harper aside and tried again. This time, I abandoned diplomacy. I told her as plainly as possible that Clark did not want to date her, that nothing romantic was going to happen between them, and that her behavior had gone too far.

Harper listened quietly until I finished.

I watched her face, waiting to see whether some understanding had finally set in.

She looked down.

Then up.

She seemed to be processing everything I had said.

For one beautiful, fleeting moment, I thought I had successfully resolved the situation.

Then Harper looked directly at me, clenched both fists, began swinging her arms in some sort of human-windmill maneuver, screamed like an animal, and charged.

This was not the resolution I had anticipated.

I instinctively tried to jump backward, only to discover that there was a wall directly behind me and an enraged Harper directly in front of me.

I put my hands up to push her away, but she still managed to land several good hits before Clark came rushing over and tackled her to the ground.

And thus concluded my brief career in workplace mediation.

Looking back at the incident today, I can say that I stood up for a male coworker who was being sexually harassed and tried to communicate a boundary that he had repeatedly attempted to establish himself.

At the time, however, I mostly felt like the idiot who got her face busted at work because she hadn’t figured out the ancient wisdom of minding her own business.

Oh, how times have changed.

Mostly for the better.

The strange thing about retelling this story now is how dramatically its context has shifted. At the time, everyone involved treated the whole debacle like an absurd workplace disaster. Today, the same story raises much more serious questions about sexual harassment, consent, workplace safety, and why on Earth management hadn’t intervened long before I appointed myself the call center’s unpaid relationship counselor.

Doing the right thing isn’t always easy, and sometimes it isn’t particularly popular either. But I did learn one valuable lesson:

If two coworkers are having a conflict serious enough that one of them wants you to serve as an intermediary, resist the temptation to become Henry Kissinger of the night shift.

Send them to HR.

Names have been changed to protect privacy.