My own father and several older mentors in my life used to always tell me "never date where you work", because if it goes south you'll still have to work with that person (or worse). I didn't listen to them and in one of my first professional jobs when I was around 25, I started pursuing this 20 year old girl who worked in our onsite cafeteria. We hit it off at first, and she used to bring me little love notes and flowers to my desk and my co-workers were all very familiar with her because she came around to see me so much. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention to the warning signs that this girl was complete nutjob. She disappeared for about a week from work and I couldn't find her, either. Then one Saturday afternoon she calls me, talks for about three minutes about absolutely nothing while avoiding answering my quetions about what had happened to her. Then says, "can you call me back in five minutes?" with an excuse that her roommate's baby was sick. Like an idiot, I did. She had me call her back two more times after that. She then showed up at my door about an hour later with her roommate, saying that it was over and that she wanted some of the things she'd left at my apartment. I thought it was incredibly bizarre. Then I went to work that Monday morning and was promptly greeted by three security guards about two minutes after I'd sat down in my office to begin work. They took me down to a room where my boss was waiting for me along with his boss and some HR people. She'd accused me of stalking her! MAN did that freak me the hell out. She'd filed a telephone harassment complaint with the local magistrate court, too, just to try and corroborate her story. So THAT was what all the "call me back business" had been about (they have to have an operator trace three calls in order to be able to "confirm" there was actually harassment). Even though I still had all the little love letters and things that she'd left for me and said so, and my co-workers stepped up and testified that this girl had been dating me, they still sent me home for a few days. I produced copies of all the love letters in my statement that I wrote for the magistrate judge, including the most recent one which was about a week before she disappeared, and noted in my statement that she disappeared for a week (which could be confirmed by her work records) with no phone call to me (which could be confirmed by my phone records) and then all of a sudden called me on a Saturday afternoon (also confirmed by my phone records) and then asked me to call her back three times due to having to "deal with her roommate's baby". If I was really harassing her, would she have called me first after disappearing for a week like that? Not likely, and the judge agreed and dismissed the case. I presented that dismissal, along with my statement and all that evidence to our security people at work as well as my boss, along with written statements from my coworkers. They allowed me back to work and fired her ass for filing false accusations. I later found out she'd gone back to her ex-boyfriend and just didn't want to tell me, so she tried to ruin my life instead. F**ked up. Never again did I date at the places I've worked since then, which was for the best anyway because I'd never have met my wife if I had. It's not worth it.
jag
