Yes. Yes, I have. I asked this question specifically so I could answer it. And no, I am not answering the question anonymously. My name is Patrick Hickey and I once sexually harassed a coworker.
A lot of people think sexual harassment is unwanted physical affection, in the sense of rubbing a coworker's shoulders or slapping them on their butt or something like that. That used to be how I viewed it. Time has shown me that I was a sexual harasser and I would like to share my story with you. If, for no other reason, than for you to learn from the errors of my ways.
About six or seven years ago I worked for a company that I had been with for about 10 years. I had developed a rapport with my coworkers and I was able to get away with saying things to them that would be considered a sexual or off color. It was all fun and games. We made each other laugh and I never thought anything of it. It was just another day at work.
But then there was a young woman who came to work for us. Her name was Rosie. (Not her real name but close enough.) Rosie was beautiful. Truly, just a stunning young woman. She was a senior at a local university. I didn't know much about her. I knew she was shy and she looked like she had trouble connecting with people but that could have just been me projecting myself onto her.
I'm not very good at women. I have no real idea how to hit on a woman and she was literally the very first woman I ever hit on in my entire life. When I was younger I could dance. Women like a guy who can dance and so I never had to get up the nerve to hit on someone. Most everything I could ever want was served up to me. But then I met Rosie. And I was faced with a choice. Because she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. And not in a movie star perfect 10 sorsorts way but in a girl-next-door perfect 7 sort of way. She was just my type. Physically, at least. I didn't know enough about her to know if we would have connected in any sort of way. But she did have a Welsh face with a sharp angular chin and a shy elvin smile. To me, she looked like the "Ultimate Savable Maiden". That may be a sexist thing to say but she did have that sort of look.
So I made up my mind that I was going to hit on her. But I didn't want to do it like just any other guy. I wanted to stand out from the crowd. I was 42 at the time. (I'm shakin' my head.....I was old enough to be her father.) But I was 42 and I was working in a go-nowhere job. However, I was.....intelligent....we'll just put that in quote marks here...I was "intelligent" and I was "clever" and I wanted to show her how intelligent and how clever I was. So I got it in my mind to put together a gift for her. You know what...we'll just put the word "gift" in quote marks as well. I collect weird things like fossils and gemstones and historical artifacts and old paper money and whatnot. I thought the appropriate thing to get her was something that was representational of me. And so I stuffed a bunch of that stuff into a box. And I put a little bit of my writing in there. I won't go into the subject matter of the writing but it was innocent stuff. I went all out on this gift. It took me about a week to put it all together. But then I thought twice about it. I thought maybe I shouldn't be giving this gift to her as it was a bit extravagant. But then I found out that she had just gotten out of the hospital and she seemed very sad and lonely. And so I convinced myself that this gift was the right thing to give her because it would cheer her up and perhaps I could even get a date out of it.
So I've got this gift but I only see this woman one day a week, which was on a Friday. While I was working on Thursday, I came up with the idea of turning the box into a puzzle box. I decided I would wrap the box with a couple of chains and then I would put a couple of locks on the chains that I could spell any word with. So I get off of work at about five that day. And I need to finish getting everything prepped for this box. I needed to go buy the chains and the locks and get the chains cut to size and get everything fitted out. But by the time I get all of this finished it was about 9 pm on that Thursday night and at about 9pm I had to start writing the riddles for the locks. Solve the riddle and that gives the word necessary to open the locks. It's not an easy thing to just suddenly be creative enough to write a couple of riddles and so I decided to use my creative juice, otherwise known as "smoking a whole bunch of marijuana".
So these were the two words I chose. I chose "Rosie" because it was her name and I didn't really know enough about her to come up with something more clever than her name. What naturally goes with "Rosie"? Well, that would be a color. I chose "White". That seemed to make sense. The Rosie riddle was innocuous enough. "By any other name, you would be the same", yadda, yadda, yadda. But then it came time for the White Riddle. You wouldn't think it would be possible to mess up something as simple as the word "white". But let me tell you, it is possible. Especially if you are high and think you are the most clever person in the whole wide world and especially if your interactions with other coworkers have sometimes been on the risque side. Because it's always clever to be risque, isn't it?
Yeah, maybe not. So, for the white riddle, what I decided to do was use the French word for white which is "blanc" which sounds like the English word "blank". And then I...well...I stuck my foot in my mouth while my head was stuck up my ass. Which takes some contorting, but I am sure I accomplished it. And I accomplished it by saying things like this.
"I would sure like to stick my blanc in your blanc. I want to put my blanc all over your face and then rub it in. I want your blanc to be all over me." yadda, yadda, yadda.
Understand, I know how a double entendre works. At least I do now. But at the time, I guess I just didn't. There was no clever another side of the entendre. But, at the time, I thought I was just acting the same way I would act with my other coworkers. And I guess I figured that any offense given by the riddle would be more than made up for by the overall quality of the gift.
The very last thing I ever said to this woman was "I left something for you in your locker". She probably thought it was some sort of company letter or something. So this was on a Friday. On the following Monday, I'm at a different location than where she worked and I get a call from a nice HR lady at corporate. And for the life of me, I just couldn't figure out why somebody with HR would ever want to call such a super swell guy like me. The subject of the gift came up and I was just completely perplexed by her reaction to it. "But it had fossils and gemstones and historical artifacts!!!" Nobody was amused. I had heard that they had even called in the police and campus security from the university she went to and appa, recently they had even had her under some sort of campus security protection over the weekend. Needless to say, that job was no longer mine.
Now, let me tell you how much I blamed the political correctness of society for this whole debacle. I had to go and get another job and I had to explain why I was fired from my previous job. And I told my interviewers that whole gosh darn story straight-faced and like I was the one who was wronged. Guess how many callbacks I got for second interviews? Yeah, I was unemployed for like a year. That was how long it took for me to realize that I needed to lie.
A couple of months after that incident with the box, I decided to look up Rosie on Facebook. I then proceeded to profess my undying...well, I didn't use the word "love".....but it probably came across that way. I was so hurt and I was so dejected. This was the first woman I had ever hit on in my entire life and every bit of it just went to crap. Radiohead's "Creep" was played on repeat for me for a long time after that.
Let me tell you what I have learned since then because none of it means anything if there was no lesson learned.
First, don't give unsolicited gifts to your coworkers. Look at it from their point of view. An old fat guy gives you, a fragile, shy, innocent young woman, a gift that probably cost about $500. Most people can tell you that nobody gives anybody anything for free. So, from her point of view, she would have thought that I was expecting something in return. Even if there was no white riddle, there still would have been that obvious expectation. Also, excessive gift-gift-giving fire is a sign of a narcissistic personality. A narcissistic person gives a gift like that because they want to be adored and adulated and they are willing to pay for that service. If a gift costs more than about $10, it is not an acceptable gift to give to a coworker. A "Get Well Soon" card would have been an acceptable gift to give in that situation. If I had wanted a date, the best thing to have done would have been to have simply asked her out for lunch. I was hedging my bets but I was hedging my bets in just about the stupidest way possible.
Second. Risque humor only works with people you already know pretty well.....or with people you meet at bars when you are drunk and they are drunk. It does not work well with people you barely know and who are forced to work with you even after your stupid joke goes awry. I have to ask myself how uncomfortable her working situation would have been, seeing me once a week, assuming I was not fired. Most likely, I would have been required to adjust my schedule so that I would never see her again.
Third. Contacting her on Facebook was just adding fuel to the fire. If she was already afraid of me, which I had no reason to believe she was not, then professing my undying love for her was probably not the smartest thing to do. That would have just made her more afraid. After that, she banned me from being able to see her Facebook page. So, I decided to look her up on google, where I could find nothing. And so now I have to wonder if she has been required to maintain anonymity on the internet because of me and my stupid gift.
Which is a real problem because I am not good with guilt and after I realized what an ass I was, I wanted to do nothing more than just apologize for my stupid behavior which I cannot do because I have no way of contacting her. I do not know if she lives in my city or if she has a different last name now and so I am required to eat my apology and I will most likely never get the opportunity to apologize to this woman for my inappropriate behavior. The best thing I can do is come here on quora and warn any would-be sexual harassers to think twice about their behavior. At the moment, nobody ever thinks they are sexually harassing someone. Take a few days to consider your planned actions and consider them from the other person's point of view. You may think your actions are forthright and innocent but that is only from your own personal and limited viewpoint. A person who is required to work with you daily should not also be required to fear you or avoid you. People work because they need money. Not because they need a boyfriend or a sexual partner.
Anyways, that's my stupid story. Rosie M., you have my honest and forthright apology. You will never know how many times I have apologized to you. Probably in the high hundreds to low thousands. I wish you nothing but the happiest of lives but may the memory of you and my inappropriate actions towards you no longer live inside of me, except as a lesson learned.
Except that I didn't learn that lesson right away. Nope, I sure did not. Remember, I said it took about a year for that lesson to finally sink in. And, at the time, I still had not confronted the underlying problem, which was twofold. One, I was going thru a mid-life crisis. Two. I was a slave to my narcissistic behavior. (For a lot of people, narcissism is built out of loneliness. People are sometimes required to use their egos to build themselves up because nobody else seems to want to do the job for them. It's a defense mechanism that helps people cope with their lives. It's not the same thing as a Narcissistic Personality Disorder or malignant narcissism, but it is along the same lines.)
So there was this other woman. And by golly, I had finally let the genie out of the bottle. I had finally hit on a woman. It may have utterly failed but, at the time, I was still living inside of the delusion of that failure being someone else's fault and I was still under the delusion that the methodology used to create that failure was still an acceptable methodology to use.
This was a woman I did sort of know. Let's say her name was Jessica. (Again, not her real name.) Jessica and I had gone on a few dates when I was younger. This was when I was still Captain Pretty Dancer. She had told me at the time that she rarely made it past a second date with a guy and I ended up being on that same dump list. But I had always worshiped her from afar.
Fast forward fifteen years. I've just gone thru the debacle with Rosie. I'm lonely and dejected but I still haven't learned my lessons and I still think I'm such a clever writer. I knew where she worked. I couldn't find her page on Facebook but I did know that she owned a business locally. I sent her a message on her Facebook business page. I knew I hadn't done a very good job of it so I decided to write her a long rambling romantic letter, and again, I did not use the word "love" but again, it probably came across as me professing my undying love for her. Which would make for two different sets of undying love within about as many months.
I took that letter to her workplace. I was too shy to speak to her in person and so I handed the letter to a guy who was working the counter at her establishment I asked him to give the letter to Jessica and then I turned around and walked out the door. I get about halfway back to my car and this guy comes running up to me with a very angry look on his face. Turns out the guy I handed the letter to was her boyfriend. He had read the post I had sent on Facebook to her business page because he was the guy who managed the social media side of things for her business. And so I received an ass-chewing right there on the sidewalk.
This is what I learned from that. First off, Facebook does not mix with marijuana or alcohol. Second, find out if she has a boyfriend first. Third, long rambling romantic letters are never the way to anybody's heart, other than the heart of someone you are already dating. That sort of thing may go over acceptably in France or inside of a romantic comedy but in real life and in a world that has a media that constantly tells people to be afraid of anything outside of the ordinary, it just brings fear of crazy ex-boyfriends.
So yeah. As of this date, I have hit on exactly two women in my life. I am 0 for 2. On the good side, however, I have recognized the narcissism within myself and I have seen my mid-life crisis for what it was. And on the good side, I ended up becoming a decent poet. Nothing creates a decent poet like going 0 for 2.
Best of luck in your romantic endeavors, but try to keep them simple. Shyness is never an excuse to overdo it. Romantic bets just can't be hedged.