Worker says her coworker kept melting down whenever she ignored him — and management’s solution was to push her to talk to him anyway
A 26-year-old woman on Reddit said years of unwanted attention from a male coworker finally reached a point where she decided leaving the job felt safer than staying. In a story later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she wrote that the man had been fixated on her since she first started at the company seven years earlier. According to her post, he tried adding her on social media, contacted her from multiple phone numbers after she blocked him, and sent strange messages about his life and past relationships that made her increasingly uncomfortable. She said the situation had gone on long enough that she now thought of him as a stalker coworker, not just an awkward one.
What pushed the story into a worse place, she said, was how he acted at work whenever she stopped responding. In the post, she wrote that if she ignored him, she would come in the next day to find him throwing things, slamming doors, refusing to do his job, and creating problems that dragged everyone else down with him. She said her supervisor’s answer was often to get her to talk to him so he would calm down, and she realized after doing that once that his outbursts seemed designed to force a response from her.
The woman said she had already raised the issue with bosses, but described the response as little more than being told to ignore it and go about her day. In comments included in the BORU thread, she said she had documented what she could and had already filed a complaint that needed to go through HR, though she expected the process to take time. After commenters urged her not to wait around in a situation that felt unsafe, she posted a short update two days later saying she had changed course.
In that update, she said she no longer planned to give the company a chance to fix it. Instead, she wrote that she was using the last of her vacation time and leaving the job permanently. She also said she had a temporary plan in place, was contacting a lawyer when offices opened, and was refusing to tell the company where she was going next. The update ended there, with her account later deleted, leaving the story marked inconclusive.
The reaction in the comments was harsh toward management as much as toward the coworker. A number of readers focused on the same detail: supervisors knew the man’s behavior flared when she would not engage, yet still pushed her to talk to him instead of treating his conduct like the problem. Others said the company seemed to be protecting itself from short-term disruption rather than protecting the employee being targeted. By the end of the thread, the story read less like an office conflict and more like a woman realizing her workplace had quietly made her responsible for managing the instability of the man harassing her.
Here is the original Reddit post.
