15x21: The Best Creepy Coworker Stories

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Speaker 2 This podcast contains adult language and content. Listener discretion is advised.
If you have a story to share, send it to let's not meetstories at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the show. This week we're sharing a compilation of stories about the creepiest co-workers from the last eight years of the podcast.
Can you believe it?

Speaker 2 We've been doing this nearly every single week since 2017. Anyways, let's get right to business.

Speaker 2 This is a really long one, but we wanted to make sure that you had plenty of scares to get you through this holiday week. Everyone, stay safe and enjoy.

Speaker 2 I had worked with Hannah for about two months before we started interacting a whole lot.

Speaker 2 She always seemed sweet. She was very friendly and came across as soft spoken and kind.

Speaker 2 We were then put on a project together, so we were working in close contact on a daily basis. We had a lot of fun together and became close very quickly.

Speaker 2 We had lunch together, we got our nails done on the weekends, went to movies, and she drove me home often. This went on for a couple of months or so.

Speaker 2 I'd like to think of myself as a pretty intuitive person, so I can read people's vibes pretty easily. As I got to know her a little better, her soft and sweet persona started cracking now and then.

Speaker 2 There were a couple of times where she would snap at me or completely change her demeanor for a a split second, and then revert back to being herself, and perhaps even overcompensate a little afterwards.

Speaker 2 This gave me a weird feeling, but I thought to myself, everyone has bad days, right?

Speaker 2 So skip forward, about six months since we've met. She had put in her notice at the place we both worked at.

Speaker 2 Her last day comes and goes, and she has now moved on to a new job.

Speaker 2 A couple of days after that, I I got a notification from Google Maps that I had a missing location from my day.

Speaker 2 I knew I had disabled my location tracking services with Google a long time ago because I thought they were creepy.

Speaker 2 So I clicked the notification, and up comes a whole log of locations.

Speaker 2 I started looking through them and quickly realized that these are not places I had been, except for my workplace.

Speaker 2 I started going through these locations day by day and realized that these match Hannah's whereabouts. She had recently taken a trip home, which is a remote island location.

Speaker 2 So I go back to these dates to see if that location matches and sure enough, there they are.

Speaker 2 I texted her asking if she was logged into my Google account. I could think of no other instance where I had logged into a Google account on any of her devices.

Speaker 2 I would have had to enter my password.

Speaker 2 I explained why I was asking, and she said that she was logged into her own Google account.

Speaker 2 She then joked that I was keeping tabs on her. This was when I started panicking a bit.

Speaker 2 How was this possible? I had deactivated these services on my account, and none of these locations were mine. I sent her a screenshot showing her what I was seeing and told her I was freaked out.

Speaker 2 She then said,

Speaker 2 Oh my god, now I'm in your account

Speaker 2 and that she would sign out and forget my details.

Speaker 2 I then asked how this could be possible, as there was no instance where I would have ever logged into my account on her phone.

Speaker 2 She confirmed that this hadn't happened and kept saying she didn't know what was going on. She then asked if I had any contacts in my phone that didn't belong to me.
I checked and I told her no.

Speaker 2 She then said she has contacts in her phone that do not belong to her. I asked her to send me a screenshot and she did.

Speaker 2 A bunch of my own contacts were in her phone, complete with names, contact pictures, and emojis.

Speaker 2 I remember feeling my stomach sink. She continues acting as if she had no idea what was going on.
At this point, I had realized that the locations dated back about three months.

Speaker 2 I asked her to call me. By this point, I'm like, okay,

Speaker 2 she has my Google Maps and contacts. If she has those, she has to have everything else connected to my Google account, including my pictures, passwords, emails, everything.

Speaker 2 We briefly talk and she says that she'll call the phone company and ask what's going on. I ask her if she has anything else of mine on her phone, any pictures or emails.
She says no.

Speaker 2 I remember feeling sick to my stomach. I felt so violated.
My trust had been betrayed.

Speaker 2 Then I start thinking about the fact that Hannah would have had to consent to downloading all this information to her phone at some point. How could she not know about this?

Speaker 2 I call my tech-savvy friend, and she tells me to immediately go to my Google account and remove all devices, change all my passwords, and enable two-factor verification.

Speaker 2 At this point, I'm trying to hold back tears. I had trusted Hannah.
We had spent so much time together, and now I'm realizing that there's no way this was some kind of accident.

Speaker 2 She couldn't just magically have access to all of this, everything,

Speaker 2 and have it downloaded.

Speaker 2 That's not a coincidence. I texted her that night asking if she had talked to the phone company.
Not sure why this would help, but it's what she wanted to do.

Speaker 2 She said no.

Speaker 2 The next day, she told me she no longer had access to my information, she just has her own emails and contacts, and that all that extra stuff, as she said, is off her phone.

Speaker 2 Hm.

Speaker 2 I thought she didn't have access to my emails. By now I'm feeling violated and very angry.
She's lying, and quite clearly too.

Speaker 2 I asked her if she had reset her phone and to confirm exactly what she had access to. I said I was really trying to figure out how this could have ever happened because this was a big deal to me.

Speaker 2 She then confirmed that yes, she could see my email on her phone, but can't anymore, most likely because I removed her device.

Speaker 2 She said she had my contacts and had noticed this a week before, but didn't know who they belonged to.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right, as if some of them didn't have the same last name as me.

Speaker 2 Her tone of writing then changed and became very cold and formal.

Speaker 2 She said, I would never purposefully navigate to your email or contact your contacts.

Speaker 2 I saw there were contacts, and I think you removed me from whatever you removed me from, And it suspended that access that I had. I no longer have any other information than my own.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry that this happened, and I am at a loss of words. I didn't do anything to get access to information that wasn't mine.
Currently, I have nobody's information other than my own.

Speaker 2 She then asked if I had access to any of her information.

Speaker 2 She had not spoken to me like this, and some of the phrasing just gave me a weird feeling. Phrases like purposely negative, didn't do anything to access information that wasn't my own.

Speaker 2 They just seemed like weird ways to say things.

Speaker 2 I told her, aside from the locations, no.

Speaker 2 Again, I told her I was freaking out and I didn't like this at all and asked if she could remember anything that happened on the day that the locations dated back to. She said no,

Speaker 2 it was while we were working on the work project together. But I wouldn't have had any reason to log into her phone.
She agreed and changed the subject.

Speaker 2 By this point I was feeling every emotion in the book. I really wanted to confront her.
How could this happen?

Speaker 2 How does she have access to all this information if she supposedly does not have my password? How did she supposedly not know that she had all this information if it was downloaded to her phone?

Speaker 2 If she had my email and contacts, she had to have all of my pictures too, right? If I had deactivated location tracking on my account, wouldn't she have to reactivate it when she logged in?

Speaker 2 Why would she reactivate it? Did she want to know where I was? Then I realized she knows exactly where I live. She even knows what window is my bedroom's window.
And yes, it's the ground level.

Speaker 2 My stomach sinks even further. I eventually decide that confronting her is not the best option.
How do I know that she has even deleted all my information?

Speaker 2 Even if she did, it could be stored somewhere. Making her mad would probably not be a good choice.
I knew that I couldn't continue being friends with her.

Speaker 2 I decided to just stop replying to her messages. We didn't work together any more, so I wouldn't have to see her daily.

Speaker 2 She texted me a couple of times after that. Once the text read Can I tell you a secret?

Speaker 2 That was so ominous. What could the secret possibly be? I still wonder about that one.

Speaker 2 I obviously never responded. I let my boss know that Hannah had access to all of the work technology, so I thought maybe running a security check would be a good idea.

Speaker 2 She got our IT to make sure that everything was okay.

Speaker 2 Some of my co-workers talk to Hannah now and then, and she asks about me. I, however, have no desire to speak to her.

Speaker 2 Just the other day, I saw her car turn the corner out in front of my house.

Speaker 2 My only theory on how this happened is that she got my password from the work computer as she used it to print things out now and then, and I am logged into my Google account on there.

Speaker 2 She acted as if she wasn't tech savvy in the time span that I knew her. However, let's be honest, I only really knew her for six months.
She could have shown me only what she wanted to show me.

Speaker 2 My friends think that she may have been into me because why would she want all that information otherwise? I'm not sure. I also think I'll never know.

Speaker 2 I'm ultra-paranoid now and have even more trouble trusting people than I did before.

Speaker 2 I'm a new listener. I came from the Heart Starts Pounding podcast, where this podcast was recommended by Caitlin.
I'm in love already and have been binge listening at work.

Speaker 2 I have a story to share myself, and here it goes. Back when I was in middle school, I went to work with my mom when workplaces used to have a Take Your Child to Work Day.

Speaker 2 Of course, I opted to go because I got to skip school. When I got to her work, I met her co-workers and their kids.

Speaker 2 I quickly became friends with some twin sisters who were there, and it was a great day.

Speaker 2 That day, I also met an older man who my mom worked with daily. I thought that he was strange right away, and then he commented about how cute I was and kept complimenting me.

Speaker 2 This gave validation to my initial instincts about him. I was hoping I wouldn't have any additional interactions with him, but I returned to my mom's workplace a few times after that.

Speaker 2 Sometimes for a small drop-by, or sometimes it was during my summer break. When it was the latter, I'd be there for an entire day.

Speaker 2 Whenever I would go there, I would always run into him, and he always gave me the creeps.

Speaker 2 One day, I had to be there for an entire day with my mom, and she was busy, so he offered to take me off my mom's hands while she was on a phone call. She agreed, and off we went.

Speaker 2 My mom always thought of him as a sweet older man, and she considered him the grandpa type.

Speaker 2 I went into his office. He let me walk in first, and then he walked in behind me and locked the door.

Speaker 2 He laughed and said, Nobody can bother us now.

Speaker 2 Even though I was only eleven, I knew that that was a red flag. I immediately didn't feel safe.
He gestured towards a chair and told me to take a seat, and then he sat across from me.

Speaker 2 He was leaning back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head, talking and asking questions.

Speaker 2 He was asking why I was giving my mom a hard time, and he said that I needed to listen better.

Speaker 2 At least, that's what I gathered, since I wasn't really listening to him.

Speaker 2 I just kept screaming internally in my head. I wanted to get the heck out of there.
Towards the end of our conversation, he suggested that we go out for a test drive in the parking lot.

Speaker 2 He said that I could sit on his lap and drive, but we can't tell my mom.

Speaker 2 Thankfully, my mom called him and said that she was done with her phone call, so I was able to go back to her. She didn't need to say that twice.
I basically ran back to her office.

Speaker 2 I told my mom what happened, and she thought that I was being dramatic.

Speaker 2 School started the following week, which I was happy about, since that meant I didn't have to go with my mom to work for a while.

Speaker 2 After I got home from school I'd be alone until my parents got home from work.

Speaker 2 Well, one day the phone rang, so I answered it.

Speaker 2 It was the creepy old man that my mom worked with. He said that he wanted to check up on me to make sure I was giving my mom an easier time.

Speaker 2 He kept talking, so I made up an excuse for why I had to get off the phone.

Speaker 2 The next day he called again.

Speaker 2 I just hung up. He called back right away and said that it wasn't nice to hang up on people.

Speaker 2 So I stayed on the phone with him, and he brought up going on a test drive again.

Speaker 2 He said that he was hoping that I would be coming back to work with my mom soon so that we could go on a secret test drive together.

Speaker 2 He kept emphasizing that it had to stay a secret between us.

Speaker 2 Again, I made up an excuse to get off of the phone and hung up.

Speaker 2 The next day he called again. I hung up immediately, but he called back three more times.
That night, I went straight to my dad and I told him everything that happened.

Speaker 2 He said that he would talk to my mom, and since then he never called my house again.

Speaker 2 I'm now twenty eight, and I've always been weary of old men.

Speaker 2 To my mom's old creepy co worker, Let's Not Meet Again.

Speaker 2 I met this girl, who we'll call Ellie, in an online chat room, and we headed off. She was literally everything I wanted in a woman, except for one thing.

Speaker 2 Ellie lived in Portugal over 3,500 miles away from where I lived in the US.

Speaker 2 We got close though, despite the distance and decided that we wanted to make a go of it, so we entered into this long-distance relationship.

Speaker 2 A few months later, I got a new job that had better pay, so I planned to use the extra funds to save up for a meeting with Ellie in person one day.

Speaker 2 Instead, I met this girl who we'll call Alice at my new job. We worked in a factory where you could work on two person teams on a single machine.

Speaker 2 The teams would vary so one day we would be working with person X on machine four and then the next with person Y on machine two.

Speaker 2 I'd been with the company for a couple of weeks and got assigned to work with her, and for the most part we got along fine.

Speaker 2 We made idle, mundane conversation as we worked, as one does, talking about nothing serious. When out of the blue, she asked me if I were single.

Speaker 2 I responded that I was not, and that I had been dating this girl Ellie for a few months, and just left it at that,

Speaker 2 thinking I had put the kibosh on whatever she was thinking may happen between us. The conversation went on as mundane as ever when she mentioned her boyfriend.

Speaker 2 I thought maybe she didn't have any ideas about anything after that and was just being nosy. Our shift ended and as such, so did the conversation.

Speaker 2 Over the next little while we worked together off and on and at one point she asked if she could add me on social media and I said sure

Speaker 2 not thinking much of it. That is until the next day at work when she mentioned some post that she read on Ellie's wall that I hadn't seen or could find.

Speaker 2 I asked her where she had seen it, and she said that it was an older post. The post was from seven years previous.

Speaker 2 I asked Alice if she had gone through Ellie's entire history, and she said, yeah, that she was bored and had nothing else to do. So after going through mine, she went through Ellie's as well.

Speaker 2 That kind of set off alarm bells in my head because who goes through the entire post history of a complete stranger in one single night?

Speaker 2 I guess my face showed my thoughts because she quickly apologized and stated that she didn't mean to be so over the top about it, but we post so rarely that she would go through just a few and suddenly she would find herself looking at years-old posts.

Speaker 2 This wasn't untrue,

Speaker 2 and so it seemed reasonable, but still weird as she had no connection whatsoever to Ellie, and so she had no business on her timeline.

Speaker 2 I mentioned it to Ellie later that day and helped adjust her privacy settings so that it wouldn't happen again.

Speaker 2 A bit later, I was working with Alice again, and the conversation was again fairly mundane when all of a sudden this guy walks over to our machine and just stood there, glaring at us.

Speaker 2 First for a while, at her,

Speaker 2 then me, then back at her,

Speaker 2 etc.

Speaker 2 After about 20 minutes, minutes, there was a call over the intercom, and he went off to answer it.

Speaker 2 Alice looked like she was about to cry after that, and it was fairly creepy, so I asked her what it was all about.

Speaker 2 It turns out that was her boyfriend, and they had just broken up. I made the mistake of asking if she was okay,

Speaker 2 just trying to be polite while secretly hoping she wouldn't go into details about it, which of course she unfortunately did.

Speaker 2 As it so happens, he'd repeatedly told her from day one that after a bitter divorce, he wasn't interested in a monogamous relationship.

Speaker 2 That he wanted something open, no strings attached, no commitments, and no expectations.

Speaker 2 She confided in me that she didn't want those things and just went along with them since she could see potential as a husband from day one, one

Speaker 2 and just like she could me.

Speaker 2 That's when the alarm bells went off again.

Speaker 2 Anyways, he was apparently serious about wanting an open relationship because he had gone behind her back and signed them up for a swinger's weekend a couple cities over.

Speaker 2 When she'd found out, she said no and that she wasn't ready for that yet, but agreed to have sex with another guy her boyfriend knew while he watched after he dropped into the conversation, how he just helped the woman down the street move in and there was definitely a spark.

Speaker 2 And when the day came for her show with the stranger, she backed out the last minute and he got pissed.

Speaker 2 Called the whole thing off, then went and slept with the woman down the street.

Speaker 2 They ended up getting into a huge fight and he broke things off with her for not being honest about what she wanted in the relationship.

Speaker 2 She told me, I just got so nervous thinking about a complete stranger having sex with me. I'm just not that kind of person.

Speaker 2 And there's very few that I would let sleep with me. Present company included, of course.

Speaker 2 I cringed at that last remark. I reminded her that I was seeing someone for almost a year at that point.
A comment she basically ignored.

Speaker 2 I got the impression at this point that in her head, just because me and Ellie hadn't met in person, that meant that our relationship was somehow less real.

Speaker 2 She also told me how they slipped together a few times since then, but she knew he was only coming around whenever the other girl was busy and didn't want sex.

Speaker 2 She also told me that he had been doing that to her anytime they worked the same shifts. He would just show up and glare at her until someone called him and had been doing this for almost a month.

Speaker 2 I told her to report him to the supervisors, and she decided that she couldn't. So I told her to find a new job.

Speaker 2 She told me that she couldn't because at her previous place of employment, a popular national chain of sandwich shops, she had stolen large amounts from the till, and because of that, and her criminal record, no other place would hire her.

Speaker 2 Over the next few months, things got worse.

Speaker 2 She would randomly walk up to me at work and start talking to me about how we'd be great together and how she always wanted a boyfriend like me who was kind, thoughtful, and a great listener, tall, handsome, yada yada yada.

Speaker 2 I would always cut her off with a short but succinct, not to mention spoken for.

Speaker 2 Then she would storm off. Alice would get very excited when we had to work together and post something along the lines of working with so-and-so today,

Speaker 2 how I love this man, and then would tag me in the post, then delete it before I could see it. But not before Ellie did, who eventually saved a screenshot and then sent it to me.

Speaker 2 When I confronted Alice with it, she basically blew it off, saying that it wasn't that big of a deal. I unfriended her and blocked her after this.

Speaker 2 Still, she would often walk up to me and tell me about sexual fantasies that she had that were very graphic.

Speaker 2 Now, I had been in the Navy prior to this, so the content of these comments didn't bother me so much as I had heard much worse from the mouths of US Navy sailors.

Speaker 2 What did bother me though was if someone heard these incredible one-sided conversations and said something to Ellie, how much trouble I would be in with the woman that I'd grown to deeply care for.

Speaker 2 Not that there was much threat of what actually was happening.

Speaker 2 I always told Ellie whatever Alice would say to me, but still it needed to stop. So I went to my direct supervisor and asked him not to put me to work with Alice anymore, as there were issues there.

Speaker 2 I didn't go into detail as I didn't want her to lose her job, but I did say that I was uncomfortable with working with her.

Speaker 2 That's when things got very creepy. She started texting me and when I asked her how she got my number, she ignored the question.

Speaker 2 I changed my number and a few days later she was texting me at my new number.

Speaker 2 So I changed it again and again, and within days, she was sending me texts again.

Speaker 2 I didn't keep the texts, and to this day, I have no idea how she was getting my numbers. And her texts were responses to in-person conversations that I had had with other people.

Speaker 2 At one point, a friend and I were working 12-hour shifts, 7 a.m.

Speaker 2 to 7 p.m., and I had said something about how I was going to order pizza when I got home and grab a shower while I waited the 30 minutes for the delivery guy.

Speaker 2 I got a text from her that night saying that she had overheard,

Speaker 2 read or eavesdropped, that I was getting pizza and suggested that I bring the pizza to her place so that we could hang out.

Speaker 2 And another immediately after that saying that when I got to her place, I would have to be naked as she was a naturalist when she was home and expected the same from her guests.

Speaker 2 I ignored all the texts and blocked the number, only to get another message from her the next day from a different number.

Speaker 2 This one was a picture message of her and nothing but three slices of strategically placed pizza telling me to pick which topping I'd like to eat first.

Speaker 2 In another instance, I was texting a friend about heading to the mall that weekend to pick up a birthday present for a mutual friend and setting up a pickup time and such.

Speaker 2 Later that same day, I got texts from her saying that she could give me a lift to the mall as she was going to Victoria's Secret to get some new lingerie and needed someone to help her in and out of the lingerie as she tried it on.

Speaker 2 I got an email later that weekend. Again, no idea how she got my email address.
It was a series of pictures of her in various states of undress as she modeled her new lingerie for the camera.

Speaker 2 That week at work, I requested to be put on the weekend shifts permanently, as she worked the morning weekday shifts.

Speaker 2 And that would mean I would only have to see her once during the week and not have to work with her.

Speaker 2 Alice's response to seeing me less was to start showing up at places where I was.

Speaker 2 I went to a small party store in town where I could get a hard-to-find flavor and brand of soda that I liked, and as I walked up to the register, Alice was suddenly there, just standing in the doorway.

Speaker 2 I paid for my sodas

Speaker 2 and then just kind of stood there.

Speaker 2 I didn't want to call the police and get myself tied up in legal issues since I was planning to travel to Europe to spend some time with Ellie, and I also didn't want to go home as I was afraid that she would follow me home and then know where I lived.

Speaker 2 So I just stood there, looking at her, not really sure what to do, and she suddenly just turned around and left without a word or purchasing anything.

Speaker 2 She showed up one night at my favorite burger place, a little hole-in-the-wall bar, and sat down at my table right across from me, and had the gall to ask me if I was going to buy her dinner.

Speaker 2 I moved to the bar, where I stayed until the bar closed at 3 a.m.

Speaker 2 and then some. The barkeep was a friend who gave me a lift home.
I caught her following me around a major chain superstore late at night when I finally shook her and I was able to get home.

Speaker 2 I got pictures sent to me of her in various states of undress in the pharmacy department. How she got away with that one, I'll never know.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, at this point, Ellie's mother was diagnosed with final stage colon cancer, and she died less than two weeks later.

Speaker 2 Feeling like I really needed to be there for Ellie, I got documentation in order, bought a plane ticket, and put in my two weeks' notice.

Speaker 2 I saw Alice twice more in my regular spots in the coming weeks as I prepared to depart for a three-month stay to help Ellie with anything that she may have needed.

Speaker 2 Once, while I was shopping for socks and underwear for the trip, she walked up and recommended what she would like to see me in before slithering away.

Speaker 2 A couple of weeks later, I was back in the States, just in time for the Fourth of July. I didn't see Alice all summer, nor did I give her much thought.

Speaker 2 Ellie came to visit at the end of September, and in November, we got married after being together and traveling back and forth for three years.

Speaker 2 Later that month, my hometown was holding their annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and Ellie had never been to one before, and we wanted to go.

Speaker 2 While standing there singing Christmas carols, me rather off-key, I felt these arms wrap around me from behind and clasp at my waist. Initially thinking that it was Ellie, I put my hands on hers.

Speaker 2 About the same time, I realized Ellie was standing next to me, so she couldn't be the one wrapped around me, nor were these hands wearing her engagement or wedding ring.

Speaker 2 I pulled the person's hands away and twirled around, coming face to face with who else but Alice.

Speaker 2 She spotted me in the crowds and decided to to say hi with some guy in tow.

Speaker 2 Ellie turned around and Alice spotted her, and I could see Arkham Asylum flash across her face.

Speaker 2 Then I saw her take a cup of hot cocoa away from the guy that was with her, and I pulled Ellie slightly behind me as Alice lowered the cup as if to throw it all over Ellie.

Speaker 2 I asked her who her date was, and she froze and looked at him and then quickly said that he wasn't her date, just a friend. This seemed like news to him as he got angry and stormed away.

Speaker 2 I watched him go, and when I turned back to Alice, she was sizing up Ellie, so I asked Ellie if she could get me a cup of that hot cocoa. Ellie left, and Alice asked,

Speaker 2 So still dating her, huh? I responded, no, we're married now.

Speaker 2 Alice froze, looked me dead in the eye, and recited my address, described the layout of my bedroom in extensive detail, and promised that she would show me what real American girls did to Euro trash before she ran off into the night.

Speaker 2 Ellie and I stayed at my parents' house for the last few days we were there. I called the cops, but nothing ever came of it.

Speaker 2 I also called my former landlord and told him he should be on the lookout for someone trying to break into that empty apartment.

Speaker 2 At the end of November, we got on a plane bound for Portugal and left left Alice behind. Ellie and I now have a baby named after Ellie's mother.

Speaker 2 I feel bad for whoever Alice latches onto next, but I'm glad that there's an entire ocean between us now.

Speaker 2 And Alice, if you're out there and you're reading this, please, for the love of God and all that is holy, let's not meet again.

Speaker 2 You're standing on a beach when you notice something strange. The horizon doesn't look right.
At first, all you can see is a thin white line. Then the line starts to rise.

Speaker 2 You realize it's not the horizon at all. It's a thirty foot tall wall of water, and it's racing straight toward you.
What would you do?

Speaker 2 On the day after Christmas in 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Indonesia, triggering a devastating tsunami.

Speaker 2 It struck Thailand without warning, no alarms, no cell phone alerts, no evacuation.

Speaker 2 In this season of Against All Odds, experience one of the deadliest natural disasters in history through the perspectives of those who did everything that they could to survive.

Speaker 2 Follow Against the Odds on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Against the Odds, Tsunami in Thailand, early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.

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Speaker 2 This happened a few years ago, but still rattles me when I think about it. For context, I'm a female, and at the time, I was around 25 years old.
I worked in an office of around 150 people.

Speaker 2 One day, I received an email from a co-worker, but didn't recognize his name. The email said something along along the lines of I'm sorry if I did something to offend you.

Speaker 2 Given the situation, if you'd prefer never see me again, I understand and I will avoid you in the kitchen.

Speaker 2 I was very perplexed as I had no idea who this guy was, but from my understanding, something offensive seemed to have taken place. I responded, I'm so sorry if I offended you.

Speaker 2 Sometimes I zone out and my expressions can be perceived as rude, so I apologize. After this response response he started getting irritated, basically denying my apology and acting passive-aggressive.

Speaker 2 I wish I had kept a screenshot of these emails since he was confusing the hell out of me with this misunderstanding.

Speaker 2 So I sent him a message and suggested that we resolve this confusing issue in person.

Speaker 2 Big mistake.

Speaker 2 He agreed to meet me in the kitchen of the office, so I went there and immediately saw this tall guy. He appeared to be just about 30 years old.

Speaker 2 Prior to this, I had seen him around, but I hadn't ever met him before.

Speaker 2 I approached him, apologized, and explained that I truthfully had no idea who he was. I said, We've never met before, and I don't want any issues.

Speaker 2 What happened next made me very concerned. His face flushed bright red, and he looked visibly angry.
He was stuttering and denying that I didn't know who he was.

Speaker 2 He said You've been staring at me for months. When we finally made eye contact, you gasped and ran away.

Speaker 2 I strongly denied this, and I told him any staring was obviously unintentional, as I was completely unaware that I was doing it, but he kept insisting that I had been staring at him for months.

Speaker 2 He said he always saw me doing it.

Speaker 2 Eventually, I realized he wasn't one to reason with and decided to end the conversation.

Speaker 2 Upon reflection, I realized that it's possible that he thought I was staring at him because in the hallway next to the kitchen there's a room with a bunch of desks.

Speaker 2 His desk was right in the line of sight if I would happen to be walking down the hallway, but I never recall looking at him.

Speaker 2 I do remember he had a funny sticker on his desk that I'd look at sometimes, but that seems like a huge stretch.

Speaker 2 After this incident, a co-worker pulled me aside and asked me why I was talking to him, so I explained the situation.

Speaker 2 She looked scared and told me that last year, he came into the office in a bathrobe, raving like a madman at everyone, and he still didn't get fired.

Speaker 2 Was I dealing with someone in the midst of psychosis?

Speaker 2 Was he dangerous? I didn't have any clue, so I reported it to my manager who took it seriously enough to tell tell his manager. I don't think he works there anymore.

Speaker 2 Thankfully, I left the company two weeks later, but I was very cautious not to go anywhere near this guy.

Speaker 2 I started working at a family-owned restaurant back in 2011.

Speaker 2 I had already had some experience as a cook, so I got the job from a friend's recommendation and was doing great.

Speaker 2 It was busy. I was mainly a fry cook.

Speaker 2 The head chef was about 16 years older than me, and he knew his stuff. He was bossy, knew his way around.
He was the head of everything in the kitchen, and he was very outspoken.

Speaker 2 But he was very friendly, and we often went out for smoke breaks together on and off.

Speaker 2 Eventually, we became friends, Friends enough that I took on the task of babysitting his kids before my cooking shift until his wife got home. Then I went to work at the restaurant.

Speaker 2 His kids were great and I really enjoyed spending time with them.

Speaker 2 Eventually though, things got a little bit too much for me to deal with. He started making sexual gestures and remarks towards me.
He would watch me in the walk-in cooler and try to almost seduce me.

Speaker 2 I should have reported him, but with my personality, I kind of laughed it off because it was ridiculous.

Speaker 2 He was happily married with kids, and I was in my early twenties with nothing to do except go out with friends and work.

Speaker 2 But then he started texting me a lot.

Speaker 2 About work mostly at the start, but then it got weird. He would send me these kissy faces and hearts.

Speaker 2 I was confused because I never really got attention from guys and being in a long-term relationship myself since 2006, I was just thinking, whoa, dude, calm down.

Speaker 2 For fear of losing my job, I didn't say anything or report him to his boss, but I would just kind of go along with it.

Speaker 2 There was one time where I had to go upstairs into the attic area to get some things and the extra freezers, and he would catch me up there and try to hold me.

Speaker 2 I was very uncomfortable, and I would push away, but he was a very large man compared to me, so it never really worked. He would just force himself on me.
Eventually, work was unbearable.

Speaker 2 I fell into pill-popping narcotics just to be able to keep my job and not punch him in the nuts, honestly.

Speaker 2 Even a few times before he left his home while I was babysitting, he would try to kiss me in front of the children. Like,

Speaker 2 what the fuck?

Speaker 2 I must have given him the wrong impression. I mean, I did say no plenty of times, but to be honest, I was terrified of him.

Speaker 2 I was afraid to lose my job, afraid that my friend who helped get him to hire me would hate me.

Speaker 2 I was afraid my boyfriend would kill him.

Speaker 2 I just did what I had to do and left.

Speaker 2 Then, while he was on medical leave, the new chef came in to take his place, and even though it sucked, I was relieved. I didn't have him around.

Speaker 2 I didn't have to be in such close spaces in the kitchen or in the walk-in cooler with this big man who obviously was trying to force me into some kind of relationship or even having sex with him.

Speaker 2 He would literally grab me during work

Speaker 2 with whomever was in the kitchen at the time.

Speaker 2 The kitchen we worked in was very small. The kitchen term behind you never really worked because it was such a tight space.

Speaker 2 And the owner was drunk, so I never reported anything because she could honestly care less. Eventually, my pursuer came back to work.
I was mortified and scared.

Speaker 2 The whole time he was on leave, I ignored his calls and texts. He said he had photos of me naked that he would use as blackmail.

Speaker 2 They were for my fiancé, and the cook stole them off of my phone. Eventually, I had had enough, and I didn't show up for my shift.
I just quit.

Speaker 2 But he never stopped with the calls. His wife ended up finding the photos of me on the computer, and after that, she was calling me and calling me.
Then they were both texting me.

Speaker 2 At one point, he said that she was willing to work out being married and having an open relationship because he said that he was in love with me. I couldn't take it.
I told my now fiancé.

Speaker 2 He lost it obviously, then blocked his number, her number, and deleted everything I could find about him and his family. One day he texted me a photo outside of my house and said, Should I knock?

Speaker 2 He then threatened to rape me.

Speaker 2 I immediately then called my mom. She called him and left him a message that I will not repeat.
I have never heard her say the F-word so many times.

Speaker 2 She threatened to kill him, call the police, or worse.

Speaker 2 And after that, I never heard from him again.

Speaker 2 I never worked in a restaurant again, and never will, probably because of fear of it happening again or him working there.

Speaker 2 It makes me sick to tell this story, but no one has ever heard it before except my mom. I'm now 33 years old and still have nightmares of him, as vivid as can be.

Speaker 2 He also threatened to hurt me and my sister and my dog.

Speaker 2 Every time I see a car that looks like his, I cringe.

Speaker 2 My former workplace tried to drug me. I know this sounds crazy, but let me explain.
I used to work at a pretty popular restaurant not far from where I live.

Speaker 2 I won't share the name of the restaurant or what my position was there for privacy reasons, but I will say there were a couple of different things I needed to handle while working there.

Speaker 2 One day when I was working, I was a little busy ringing people up who were ready to pay for their bills.

Speaker 2 I was juggling multiple parties, so I asked my coworker if they could get me a refill on my drink. My coworker helped me and got me the refill.
All was fine.

Speaker 2 On this particular day, I remember feeling energized and completely healthy from the moment that I woke up.

Speaker 2 I drank half of my drink that my coworker refilled for me, and I started to feel sleepy and dizzy. Thankfully, another coworker noticed this, and they kept an eye on me until it was time to clock out.

Speaker 2 When I got home, I legitimately passed out on the couch with my family. I didn't think anything of it until later when I woke up, feeling very confused.

Speaker 2 I thought that it was a little strange, but I let it go. A few days later, I was working with another co-worker who was a peer and had the same position that I did.

Speaker 2 We had plans to hang out that night after work. When we were done hanging out, we went back to the restaurant where our other co-workers were still hanging out and drinking.

Speaker 2 This was allowed at my restaurant after hours. Right when we walked in, my manager and his brother asked if I wanted a cocktail or something to drink.

Speaker 2 It was already late, and I had to drive, so I told him that I was okay, but they kept pressing.

Speaker 2 Not even water? They asked. Again, I told them that I was okay and I didn't need a drink.

Speaker 2 They ended up making my co-worker a drink, and then they made me one that I put in a to-go cup and took to my friend's house.

Speaker 2 I never drank that to-go drink, so I just gave it to my friend when I was at her house. I immediately left her house, and she drank the drink the next day.

Speaker 2 After she had the drink, she said that she felt completely out of it. She found it to be odd, as she never had issues with drinking alcohol before.

Speaker 2 She told me this and explained what happened to her and how it made her feel. She experienced the exact same thing that I had just a few days prior.

Speaker 2 I talked with my mom and I asked her about the symptoms of being drugged. After that conversation, I do not doubt in my mind that my coworkers were putting something in my drinks to do God knows what.

Speaker 2 The more I think about this, the more I wonder what would have happened if I would have drank that drink at the restaurant the night before.

Speaker 2 If it wasn't for my coworker looking out for me the first time I was given the drink that had something in it, I don't know what would have happened.

Speaker 2 After that, I refused to eat or drink anything without seeing it made in front of me. Luckily, I have since left this workplace, workplace and I haven't had any issues since.

Speaker 2 This story takes place back in 2019.

Speaker 2 To start things off, I should give a little bit of background to the situation. I'm a male and I was 22 years old at the time and had been living in San Antonio, Texas.

Speaker 2 I had been working at a popular retail store right outside of a local shopping mall, and I experienced the general retail life on this job.

Speaker 2 I made some good friends during my time here, who I would later keep good ties with even after I quit.

Speaker 2 One of these said friends, I'll call Amber, was a few years older than me and genuinely seemed like a good friend during the time that we had gotten to know each other.

Speaker 2 There were some days where after our shifts we both felt like we needed to blow off some steam and catch a drink before the night ended.

Speaker 2 So we would head to our favorite local drinking spot downtown where we would have a few drinks and dance and overall have a great time.

Speaker 2 Fast forward a little bit, we had both quit our jobs at the retail store due to poor pay and bad hours, and I had been hired as a server at a known resort and and spa in my town.

Speaker 2 Granted, I only lasted at this job for a couple of months before I was fired for reasons unrelated to this story.

Speaker 2 I also must say that 2019 was a rough year for me, probably the hardest year of my life until that point in time.

Speaker 2 I had recently gone through a breakup with my first relationship and was completely heartbroken.

Speaker 2 I lost my job, as I mentioned, and I was having an extremely difficult time trying to find a new one and therefore was shorthanded when it came to money, and I was going through a rocky relationship with both of my parents due to them being divorced and me and my sister being put right in the middle.

Speaker 2 All of this added up. It created a negative mind space for myself, and I developed a bad case of depression and suicidal tendencies.

Speaker 2 During the summertime, Amber and I became close friends, as she asked me to come over and hang out quite often.

Speaker 2 Her last roommate was a drug dealer and would bring shady people over all the time who would cause all kinds of mischief.

Speaker 2 Eventually their roommate's situation ended with their apartment being robbed and her friend being almost beaten to death. Now,

Speaker 2 she had her own place, so she invited me over often because she hated being alone.

Speaker 2 Amber also struggled with mental health issues, never professionally diagnosed, but she was pretty violent and suicidal, as I would later come to discover.

Speaker 2 As we would hang out, over time, she would tell me stories about her crazy ex-boyfriend who she seemed to be intensely scared of, but how she was still madly in love with him.

Speaker 2 During this time, I found out that Amber II was a drug dealer, but she never seemed to sell any hard drugs, just dab pens that contained marijuana.

Speaker 2 She did, however, do hard drugs herself, and would frequently have them in her apartment.

Speaker 2 Nights that I would stay with her, which were very frequent, she would have me turn off all of the lights in the apartment and the T V and then creep my way over to the windows to check everything outside to see if things were okay,

Speaker 2 because she might have heard the smallest noise outside.

Speaker 2 She would have me do this because she thought her crazy ex, who she was still in love with, was trying to break in and kill her, even though he was locked up in jail at the time.

Speaker 2 Things like this happened so often that I became numb to the situations because I had to do this often.

Speaker 2 Generally speaking, I used to just always assume the best in people, and I never spoke up for myself in compromising situations, and I would put other people's comfort over mine.

Speaker 2 Now, going back to my mental health during this time, with the accessibility of hard drugs being around and Amber not making me pay for any of them, mainly because I didn't have a job, I started doing some of these drugs myself.

Speaker 2 And I just want to state that this was by far not the proudest moment of my life.

Speaker 2 I did a bunch of reckless things that I now never do, but it did help me to learn a lot about myself, which I'm very grateful for.

Speaker 2 Anyways, these said drugs would keep you awake for days at a time, and we would do them from the moment that we would wake up to when we would take small breaks between just a few days later and finally get some sleep.

Speaker 2 That being said, our days were extremely long, and we would get easily agitated at each other, especially because she adopted a puppy randomly and would ensure his comfort over everything and everyone else's.

Speaker 2 By that I mean at night, when we would be awake, if I moved the wrong way in bed, where the dog would be asleep, or if I made the wooden floor creak or closed a door just a bit too loudly, she would berate me for being inconsiderate, and generally an awful person for not considering her dog's feelings.

Speaker 2 We had to whisper at all times. We could barely keep the TV at an audible volume for the sake of the dog.

Speaker 2 She would then later apologize to me for berating me, saying that I just needed to learn from my mistakes.

Speaker 2 She did that often too. She would berate me all throughout the days for almost anything and then later apologize and say that she does it so that I would understand better because I wasn't smart.

Speaker 2 I put up with a bunch of things, all from Amber because she gave me free drugs, and she let me stay with her for free essentially.

Speaker 2 If we ever left her apartment, she would pay for everything, but not because I asked her to, but because she said she likes having that kind of power over people.

Speaker 2 If she pays for them and lets them stay over, or if she gives them things, then she can say and do whatever she wants to you, and you just have to accept the fact, in case I stupidly did.

Speaker 2 Eventually, she started dating this guy who we'll call Renee, and at first things seemed okay between them.

Speaker 2 Instead of me staying at her place so frequently, she would have him over and I would go stay at at my dad's house, where I technically was living to begin with.

Speaker 2 Whenever Renee would leave and go back to his house, Amber would call me right away and say that she wants me to come back, and we would continue to get high.

Speaker 2 Eventually, Amber found out Renee was cheating on her with his ex-girlfriend and she dumped him. Naturally, Amber became depressive and would act out.

Speaker 2 She's the type of person who has to be in a relationship at all times because she doesn't know how to love herself and be alone.

Speaker 2 If we were ever listening to music, I was never allowed to play anything that I liked because she said that it made her want to kill herself.

Speaker 2 Even in my own car where I had Bluetooth, she demanded that she take over and would just play heavy metal or Screamo.

Speaker 2 I obliged because, hey, I got free drugs, and I just didn't like any type of confrontation.

Speaker 2 After their breakup, her crazy ex was released from jail, and she asked me to take her to pick him up so that they could start seeing each other again.

Speaker 2 At first, I strongly tried to convince her that it was a bad idea, but she endlessly persisted, so of course, I drove us to find him in the middle of nowhere by some library, and then we went back to her apartment.

Speaker 2 I didn't stay with her much during this time because I was worried about my safety around him,

Speaker 2 so I kept most contact between me and Amber through texting.

Speaker 2 As you might guess, however, things did not go well between them both, and after several days and nights of fighting they split, and she asked me to stay with her again.

Speaker 2 This is when I really started to see how crazy she was.

Speaker 2 She swore that he hacked and bugged her phone and laptop so that he could sell her information because she found a booklet of his with some coding information and tried taking apart her laptop to see what he did.

Speaker 2 She also had me help her take the plastic face off of one of the electrical outlets in her apartment because she had seen some scratches on it, and she thought her ex was trying to hide a camera or something behind it.

Speaker 2 No matter what it was that she believed, I always went along with it. Amber was not the type of person you could openly doubt because she would start to accuse you of similar things.

Speaker 2 For example, because she was lonely after breaking up with her ex, she started hooking up with Renee, even though she caught him cheating just a month prior.

Speaker 2 And again, I told her this was a bad idea, but she wouldn't listen.

Speaker 2 She would then have me drive her to go pick him up from his house, since he did not drive either, and they would go back to her place, and I would go to my dad's. It was this same cycle as before.

Speaker 2 When he would go back home, she would call me to come stay, and we would be up to our same shenanigans once again.

Speaker 2 At about this point in time, Amber bought a gun.

Speaker 2 It was a small handgun that she kept in her apartment, but she made sure to show it to me so that I knew that she had one, so I wouldn't, quote-unquote, act up.

Speaker 2 She would also accuse me of taking some of her drugs while I slept away to stay in another room because something seemed off, because she would leave things a certain way, so that she could make sure she would ever catch me if I were lying.

Speaker 2 I should also say, early in our friendship, when I would stay over, she told me she watches people sleep so she can tell when they're faking or not.

Speaker 2 She told me that she has in fact watched me sleep before.

Speaker 2 To no one's surprise, she caught Renee cheating on her again and became upset, but didn't break up with him.

Speaker 2 One day she asked me to take her dog dog for a walk so that he could use the bathroom and I happily took him out because I needed a breath or two away from her.

Speaker 2 Surprisingly, however, this is where things started to get actually crazy.

Speaker 2 When I came back from the walk, she was very quiet and had her back to me while she was washing some dishes. There was a thick feeling of tension in the air, which I can still feel years later.

Speaker 2 It was as if her insecurities and anger manifested into this tangible fog.

Speaker 2 She asked me about my overnight bag that I always brought over that had a couple of shirts and my bathroom essentials.

Speaker 2 This bag was also the same one that I used a few months prior when I went to an EDM festival and carried all of my costume essentials in it, which included some glitter.

Speaker 2 She said that she had seen that same exact glitter on Renee's shirt and asked me why it was such a coincidence.

Speaker 2 The realization didn't hit me until after everything ended that she asked me to go for a walk with her dog so that she could go through my bag without me being in the room.

Speaker 2 I had explained to her, however, about the rave and where the glitter came from, to which she doubted, but seemed to let it go for the moment.

Speaker 2 Eventually, things progressed, and she started accusing me of sleeping with her boyfriend and would try pressuring me into saying that I did.

Speaker 2 She would say that she wouldn't be mad if I would just admit it, but she fucking hates liars

Speaker 2 and would casually say in random conversations the malicious things that she would do to people if she ever caught them double-crossing her.

Speaker 2 She would try using different scare tactics on me, so I would admit to what she thought I did. But the thing was, I never did anything.
I should also mention about myself that I am a gay man.

Speaker 2 Amber knew this and that's why she accused me of having sex with her boyfriend.

Speaker 2 She said that she never trusts gay men, because we always lie and cheat, and we're awful people in general. But she didn't mind being friends with me.

Speaker 2 And we often said I love you to each other whenever I would leave. That's usually how my friendships are.
It's not a romantic type of I love you, just a platonic one.

Speaker 2 Renee was not into men, however, at all.

Speaker 2 And she would accuse me of sleeping with him still. He also denied everything because nothing ever happened.

Speaker 2 She accused me of memorizing where he lived, and said that I would go to his place after leaving hers to hook up with him.

Speaker 2 At one point when they started dating, she asked me my opinion about how he looked, and I told her he was cute.

Speaker 2 However, I told her that he was cute, being he was her type, not mine.

Speaker 2 Renee was small and slender, pale complexion, younger than I was, had face and neck tattoos and was generally a dead beat, to be frank about it.

Speaker 2 He couldn't hold a job and was genuinely not trying to better himself.

Speaker 2 He just wasn't my type of guy, not the one I'm typically attracted to.

Speaker 2 She would bring it up and throw it in my face about how I called him cute.

Speaker 2 Amber would frequently, physically and verbally assault her partners, including Renee.

Speaker 2 Because Renee was afraid of Amber, he lied and told her that he did in fact hook up with me, but she should only be mad at me for the whole thing and leave him alone.

Speaker 2 Now the thing that scared me the most in this whole situation, which I'll never forget the moment that this was happening, was the last day I ever saw her, and she was asking me a specific question.

Speaker 2 It was the night before I was attending a different festival.

Speaker 2 I wanted to get high the night before, so I told Amber I was staying over, and she agreed.

Speaker 2 I get to her apartment, and she had another friend there, already, and they were getting high when I joined in, and she immediately started accusing me of things again.

Speaker 2 She told me that she knows her best friend stabbed her in the back, and was a lying, cheating whore.

Speaker 2 She referred to me as her best friend at the time, so I knew that she was talking about me.

Speaker 2 She then goes to grab something from her closet and returns. When she came back, I saw in her hand that exact small white handgun that she had bought just a week prior.
And she proceeds to ask me,

Speaker 2 What do you think I should do when I find out that my best friend is a liar? Should I put a bullet in their eye socket or their kneecap?

Speaker 2 She was staring at me dead in the eyes when she asked me this.

Speaker 2 There was no concern of emotion on her face, and you could see that every breath that she took, she exhaled with a bit of anger and hatred.

Speaker 2 I, however, was not going to let her know that I was scared because she feeds off of the intimidation.

Speaker 2 I don't know how I didn't choke on my words because I remember feeling my heart beating in my throat, a voice screaming in my head to get out of there, but I told her I wasn't a liar, and she had no reason to believe that I was.

Speaker 2 I never saw her again after that night. For some stupid reason, I did stay at her place the rest of the evening, though.

Speaker 2 I remember laying down in bed and trying to get some sleep even though I was still shaken up about the whole situation.

Speaker 2 However, I never fully fell asleep, as I could hear her talking bad about me just a few feet away to her friend.

Speaker 2 I also wasn't able to sleep because I was worried that she was actively watching me sleep to see if I was faking, like she said she had done before.

Speaker 2 Since then I blocked her on everything that I could think of.

Speaker 2 After I left the next morning she was texting me, threatening to shoot me, or send some guys to my sister's apartment to attack her since she knew where she lived, or to expose me to my family for being a lying, cheating whore that does drugs and is a family disappointment.

Speaker 2 I never reported any of this to the cops as I didn't want my family to find out, and I was doing hard drugs, also because I simply didn't want to get involved.

Speaker 2 I did know that Amber wasn't going to actually do anything that she said because she could equally get into trouble,

Speaker 2 and that everything she said was just part of her scare tactics.

Speaker 2 So, to finish on a lighter note, I've since stopped using drugs, and I'm fully able to stand up for myself in uncomfortable situations thanks to her, and I won't let myself get walked all over again.

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Speaker 2 Fucking Damien.

Speaker 2 This guy was the absolute worst.

Speaker 2 After getting fired from his job as a cook, he continued to hang out around the restaurant and start shit with people, which is how I met him because he was never actually an employee when I was there.

Speaker 2 Some background. Damien was physically abusive to his girlfriend, who worked as a host up front, to the point of physically beating her in the back of the kitchen.

Speaker 2 They would constantly have shouting matches, and I heard from others that she was very sweet.

Speaker 2 It was really Damien that was terrible. Other co-workers tried to call him out on it, and he would just threaten to kill them or beat them up.
He was crazy.

Speaker 2 The reason he wasn't fired was only due to his relationship with the kitchen manager, Dom.

Speaker 2 Dom had taken Damien under his wing, so he let him get away with all of his bullshit. It wasn't until an assistant manager threatened to report the situation to HR that Dom finally talked to him.

Speaker 2 He got away with so much, but when he was confronted, he lashed out and started cussing Dom out. Apparently, Damien's aggression was fine until it was directed at him because Dom fired him that day.

Speaker 2 Flash forward about a few months, I start working at this restaurant as a host and I immediately take issue with Damien hanging around.

Speaker 2 He would sexually harass myself and other girls verbally and sometimes physically, like giving us weird massages. I tell the host manager, Amanda, and nothing happens.

Speaker 2 At this point, I didn't know a whole lot about Damien's history, and I didn't realize how aggressive he could get.

Speaker 2 I call him out on it one day, saying he's creepy, obnoxious, and an asshole, and it catches him off guard.

Speaker 2 A day or two later, he tries to get into an argument with me, and I say, Don't ever fucking talk to me.

Speaker 2 That worked for maybe a week or so, although I hear from others that he's obsessing over it, and he's angry. He finally confronts me at the host stand and it turns into a shouting match.

Speaker 2 And let me just remind you, he doesn't even work here.

Speaker 2 I will completely admit, I'm not blameless. To be honest, I went out of my way to tell him off and put myself in danger by doing so.

Speaker 2 I heard how he was and had even had him physically threaten me multiple times, but still wouldn't back down. I waited too long to get other people involved.

Speaker 2 The conversation starts off with him pretending to make amends, but really just trying to figure out why I wouldn't talk to him and insult me.

Speaker 2 And I tell him I just don't like him and that there's nothing to talk about. I tell him he doesn't work there and we didn't need to talk to each other.

Speaker 2 He starts getting mad and aggressive and calls me a bitch.

Speaker 2 The shouting match was really sparked after I called him pathetic and the low life.

Speaker 2 I think Damien was really used to people just ignoring him and just tolerating his presence, so I really pissed him off.

Speaker 2 He starts screaming at me and yells sexist statements like, You're not worth it if my dick's not in you. Some bullshit like that.

Speaker 2 Somehow the managers didn't hear this, but my friend and co-worker pulled me into the back and tell me it's not worth it.

Speaker 2 I just couldn't understand why they'd let him do whatever he wanted.

Speaker 2 A few nights later, and I've just started to get scared. My boyfriend James had come to pick me up.
We didn't have a car, and so we just walked to and from our jobs.

Speaker 2 He gets in the middle of it, though. Basically, he confronts Damien and asks if he's the guy who's been beating his girlfriend for the last two weeks.

Speaker 2 Instantly Damien is threatening to fight him and insulting him. James was going through a lot at the time and was not in a normal state of mind, so I think he let this get away from him too much.

Speaker 2 I go to cry in the bathroom, and then James and I find a ride from a co-worker, since we deemed it unsafe to walk home as Damien was whipping around the parking lot in his mustang.

Speaker 2 The next night, my boyfriend had borrowed our roommate's car to pick me up and was sitting at the front waiting for me to finish my closing duties.

Speaker 2 Damien comes in with this other guy and starts trying to bait James into a fight.

Speaker 2 He doesn't take it, and he just ignores him. Damien and the guy go to the back and come out five minutes later, insulting him as they leave.

Speaker 2 I don't finish my closing work until about 45 minutes later.

Speaker 2 When I'm finally done, we hear an engine revving.

Speaker 2 We look out and we watch Damien whip out of the parking lot, followed by six other cars.

Speaker 2 I'm positive they were going to try and jump James if he had gone out there.

Speaker 2 We call the cops but we need to get my roommate's car back to her so we can only stay for about 15 minutes. We find out later that they showed up but obviously couldn't do anything.

Speaker 2 The whole situation has scared the shit out of me at this point and none of my managers are doing anything about it.

Speaker 2 Damien even hangs out in the back of the kitchen despite not being employed there and they're all fine with it.

Speaker 2 I tell my dad about it and go to HR which is really hard to get in contact with at a chain restaurant which is why it took me so long and my dad offers to help.

Speaker 2 I think as I was 19 and had recently moved out and gotten my own place I really wanted to handle this on my own as an adult. I obviously couldn't.

Speaker 2 And it had gotten to the point that I knew the managers weren't going to listen to me, so I finally accepted that I needed a real adult.

Speaker 2 After my dad goes in and threatens to sue, the manager finally listens. Amazing what threatening a lawsuit will do.

Speaker 2 They ban Damien from the premises and then pretend like they didn't know what was going on with me, even though I had told Amanda and Dom both.

Speaker 2 They just didn't take me seriously.

Speaker 2 A month goes by, and things things are great. You'd think it would end right there, but no.

Speaker 2 Damien shows up at my apartment complex in his motted mustang. It was like badly painted black with a deception logo on the hood.

Speaker 2 Turns out, he moved in with a couple of guys and definitely knew where I lived.

Speaker 2 I'm actually pretty sure Amanda has mentioned me living there to him casually, since they were friends before realizing that he hated me.

Speaker 2 Surprisingly, not much happened at first, though I was trying to avoid him at all costs. But of course, after a couple of weeks, he tries to hit James with his car and yells at us from his car window.

Speaker 2 I tell the landlady, and apparently, he had already bitched about us to her. Luckily, we were in good standing with her, and she could tell that he was off.

Speaker 2 She let us know that he wasn't on the lease and said she'd watch for any excuse to kick him out. Thankfully he is chaotic as fuck, so this doesn't take long.
And he's gone.

Speaker 2 The last time I saw him, I had borrowed my dad's car for work one day, and I was leaving. I half noticed a silver car behind me.

Speaker 2 As I pulled up to alight, I make eye contact with Damien through the rear view mirror, and I instantly freak out internally.

Speaker 2 He followed me to the bank, but speeds off as I pull in.

Speaker 2 Thank God I didn't go straight home.

Speaker 2 I'll start with a little backstory. I'm a 24-year-old female and I fell in love with national parks, so much so that I decided to work full-time at one for about three years.

Speaker 2 This experience allowed me to meet some great people, but it also welcomed some sketchy individuals.

Speaker 2 The only issue that I really noticed was that he seemed like he had a drinking problem. He would show up to work, still drunk, and be sent home somewhat regularly.

Speaker 2 He seemed innocent, though, in a socially awkward way. I only worked with him for a few months before I was transferred to another location and offered a pay raise.

Speaker 2 A few months after starting the position, I was in the employee break room browsing my news feed when I received five messages within a three-minute time span.

Speaker 2 I didn't even realize people could type that fast. The messages were from Sam, something that caught me off guard because I had had never spoken to him outside of my last position.

Speaker 2 The messages consisted of vague threats regarding my friends and myself. He seemed upset to find that I had gay friends and thought that I was quote-unquote tainted from association.

Speaker 2 I was less upset at his foul perception of me and more pissed that he had targeted my friends who were truly lovely people.

Speaker 2 I'm bad when it comes to taking the high road and decided to give this man a piece of my mind.

Speaker 2 We weren't friends, hardly acquaintances, so I didn't feel that his behavior was appropriate and quite frankly I was angry.

Speaker 2 Through our exchange, the original rude context of the messages became obviously threatening. He told me that I should die along with my gay friends and that he'd be more than happy to end our misery.

Speaker 2 I was shocked. His anger didn't make sense to me, and I realized that I wasn't going to reason with this lunatic, so I decided to get HR involved.

Speaker 2 We worked with the same company, so I thought this would be the best route to prevent any further harassment.

Speaker 2 HR advised me to block the contact from him while they investigated, but also to alert the authorities in case he decided to act out his threats.

Speaker 2 Authorities were involved, but didn't seem too phased by the messages that I showed them. They almost seemed annoyed that I had had bothered calling them in the first place.

Speaker 2 I filled out a statement and was told to contact them if anything progressed. The next day I woke up to find trash all over my front steps.
Odd, but not too strange.

Speaker 2 I actually thought it was a raccoon since I was in a national park. Then I saw a piece of paper with the words, watch your back, bitch,

Speaker 2 scribbled onto it.

Speaker 2 I looked around the other neighboring cabins to see if anyone was watching, but I didn't see anyone.

Speaker 2 I cleaned up the mess, but I saved the note. I wanted to show my sister who lived with me.
When she got back home later that morning, I caught her up on the previous night's events.

Speaker 2 She didn't even know Sam because, like I said, we weren't friends. Why would I mention him in my personal life?

Speaker 2 I gave her a brief description of him in case she saw him lurking around and headed to work.

Speaker 2 Halfway through my shift, I get a phone call from Alexa. She sounds shaken when she tells me that a man matching Sam's description came to our cabin and asked about me and where I was.

Speaker 2 She played dumb and pretended to not know who I was. After an awkward silence, he said,

Speaker 2 I'll be back for her later and walked away.

Speaker 2 She said he sounded and acted as if if he had been heavily drinking and had an intense coldness to him.

Speaker 2 I'm not messing around at this point. I've watched enough crime shows to know that I shouldn't underestimate people.

Speaker 2 So I called the company's security team and asked them to have someone check on my sister and to be escorted home immediately. I'm home within 20 minutes of a phone call.

Speaker 2 She gave security some more information and they were able to find out which cabin he resided in. Apparently he only lived about two minutes of a walk down our street, which was very unnerving.

Speaker 2 Park rangers are called again and they get more statements from both of us and decide to pay him a visit. They seem to be taking the situation a bit more seriously now that he knows where I live.

Speaker 2 They come back after talking to his roommate. It's confirmed that he lives there but hasn't been home since the night before.
Authorities put a word out to keep an eye out for Sam.

Speaker 2 They offer to have a unit keep an eye on us that night, which we gladly accept, and we go to bed.

Speaker 2 I wake up to 34 messages from an unknown number. It was Sam again.
He was very angry that I got HR and Rangers involved. He said,

Speaker 2 you're going to pay for this, bitch.

Speaker 2 You fucked with the wrong person and I'll fucking end you.

Speaker 2 I email HR and present them with screenshots of the message and texts. I demand that they resolve this immediately and want to set up a meeting with the director to discuss termination.

Speaker 2 See, in national parks, when you're hired, the company provides cheap housing on site and when you're fired, you have to leave the national park boundary within 24 hours.

Speaker 2 So I thought that this would solve the majority of my issues. They seem to agree with me.
and try to locate Sam for a meeting. No one has seen him since the first message began two days prior.

Speaker 2 So the park is on a manhunt. The park is huge, and it's easy to hide if you don't want to be found.
Thankfully, his roommate alerted officials when Sam stumbled home drunk the next day.

Speaker 2 They're able to speak with him and sober him up enough to take him to the HR building a couple of hours later.

Speaker 2 After the meeting, I'm notified that he has been given a first and final write-up and will continue to work and live on my street.

Speaker 2 He apparently gave a sob story story about his personal issues and promises to leave me alone. I was baffled that even with him threatening to kill me, they weren't going to fire him.

Speaker 2 Thankfully, the Rangers were equally as surprised and still offered to provide surveillance just in case.

Speaker 2 It was quiet for three days. I thought it was actually over and started to feel bad for Sam, actually.

Speaker 2 I thought maybe he was going through some shit, and I was his mental mental punching bag. I didn't agree with it, but I no longer felt as threatened, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 2 That was until I received a knock on my door and opened it to find two park rangers wanting to speak with me.

Speaker 2 According to the Rangers and a few people from the HR department, Sam's roommate had to call the emergency line when Sam started acting bizarre after the meeting and tried to convince him to lure me into a secluded place so that Sam could take care of me.

Speaker 2 Thankfully, his roommate wasn't a psycho and reported the situation immediately once Sam went to the bathroom.

Speaker 2 Rangers were on site within minutes and had restrained Sam in order to search their cabin for evidence.

Speaker 2 They ended up finding a loaded firearm and a suspected suicide note that stated he was going to kill me and then take his own life.

Speaker 2 There was plenty of evidence for a case and he was successfully banned from all national parks in the U.S.

Speaker 2 I have since moved to a different state and have changed my contact information.

Speaker 2 He has since contacted me once to brag about how much I helped him secure unemployment benefits, which I quickly shared with the officials.

Speaker 2 According to officials, he is restricted to a southern Arizona county due to other crimes that he later committed, and that I shouldn't worry about him finding me.

Speaker 2 As for HR, the director actually had to deal with harassment from Sam after the banning and asked me to testify on her behalf if it turned into something more sinister.

Speaker 2 I haven't heard anything else, so I'm assuming she found another way to stop the assault. I don't understand why he targeted me.
He hadn't had very many interactions, even at work.

Speaker 2 I've tried to dig through memories to find a single time that I may have invited this kind of behavior, but I'm convinced it was due to many factors, including his instability instability and alcoholism.

Speaker 2 Sam, if you're watching me, let's not meet.

Speaker 2 This story started when I was in high school. I'm nearly 40 years old now, but whenever I think about this person that I once knew, who we'll call Tommy, it still sends chills down my spine.

Speaker 2 When I was a senior in high school, my friends and I worked with a man who was in his late twenties to early thirties named Tommy.

Speaker 2 He seemed totally harmless, if not just a little too eager to hang out with the group of high school kids.

Speaker 2 Over that year, we somehow started roping him into buying us alcohol for parties on the weekends every now and then.

Speaker 2 At first, it seemed like a great arrangement until Tommy started exerting more control over the alcohol when it would be in his possession.

Speaker 2 What I mean by that is he would tell us that we could come pick up the alcohol from him at his house, which was in a very remote location. He lived alone.

Speaker 2 When we were there, he would try to pressure us or guilt us into staying around and hanging with him in his dimly lit living room.

Speaker 2 Sometimes he would pressure us as a group, and sometimes he would pick someone to individually pressure.

Speaker 2 At the time, I wrote it off as Tommy just being lonely, and that our friendly favor asking was being mistaken as us seeking a deeper friendship.

Speaker 2 So we stopped asking him for favors and tried to keep things cool and cordial with him moving forward. But Tommy's attention on us didn't really seem to wane.

Speaker 2 As I was still in high school, I was living at home with my family in our small town.

Speaker 2 While our town was indeed very small, it was still unnerving when Tommy, one day, revealed that he knew where I lived.

Speaker 2 I had never told him where I lived, so I thought that it was odd, but I let it go.

Speaker 2 Around this time I started getting phone calls from blocked numbers on our house phone.

Speaker 2 The person, whoever it was, would hang up once anyone answered the call.

Speaker 2 To this day, I still don't know if it was Tommy on the other end of those calls, but I do know that after he let me know that he knew where I lived is when I started hearing and seeing his car driving past my house unexpectedly at random hours of the day and night.

Speaker 2 He drove a loud sports car that was modified to make even more noise than it ordinarily would.

Speaker 2 His vehicle was altered with racing type things. Sometimes I'd be in my room and I would just hear the muffler blaring down the street as if Tommy was checking if I was home.

Speaker 2 It's important to mention that I never told anyone about Tommy's drive-bys for a few reasons. One, I wasn't sure if I was confusing coincidences for creepy behavior.

Speaker 2 Up until this point, Tommy was well versed in pushing the envelope, just so much.

Speaker 2 I didn't have any hard proof of any stalking behavior, with the exception of his texts and calls. His texts and calls were pushy and mildly aggressive, but not all-out-threatening.

Speaker 2 My second reason for not telling anybody what was going on is bigger. I'm currently an out and proud gay man, but back then I was still very much in the closet.
I wasn't ready to be out to anyone.

Speaker 2 For a long while I wondered if Tommy might also be in the closet and maybe he recognized that I was too.

Speaker 2 At that time, I worried that reporting Tommy might expose what I had come to suspect, which was that maybe he thought our interactions were more than what they were.

Speaker 2 Thankfully, I got really busy with my senior year stuff, and time passed quickly. I graduated and went to college in a nearby major city.

Speaker 2 I didn't hear from Tommy for several years, and I felt relief that he had just lost interest, and he moved on to somebody else.

Speaker 2 By this time, I was out to my family, and was of legal age to be on dating apps. You probably know where this is going.

Speaker 2 I started talking to a guy that I had matched with while in the city. The photo was obviously not Tommy, and the guy I was talking to never said anything that indicated he was Tommy.

Speaker 2 This guy and I talked for a few weeks before he finally revealed himself to me, and when he did, he did so without any shame that he had been catfishing me.

Speaker 2 Turns out, my earlier suspicions were correct, and this was Tommy's way of trying to initiate something more with me.

Speaker 2 I immediately blocked him. I hoped that this would end it, and that I'd never hear from him again, but that wasn't the case.

Speaker 2 Even more years went by, and at this point, it had been ten years since I was in high school, making it a full decade since Tommy and I had even been in the same vicinity.

Speaker 2 One day he texted me from a new number.

Speaker 2 He couldn't text me from his old one because I had blocked it. He apologized for his previous behavior and said that he just wanted to talk.
He asked if I would give him another chance.

Speaker 2 I immediately blocked that number too.

Speaker 2 As I said, I'm almost forty. I'm happily married and I live out of state, far away from where Tommy lives.

Speaker 2 For many years I often worried that specifying where I lived or where I was online would result in Tommy showing up. I worried that maybe he'd snap and do something to me or anybody that I was dating.

Speaker 2 I'm grateful to have had better LGBT role models and friends come into my life, and luckily, I have not heard from Tommy in any way for a long time.

Speaker 2 To any underage listeners, think again before convincing someone to buy you alcohol. You don't know what's going on in their mind, especially someone who's open to doing that.

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Speaker 2 I've got a story I've been debating about telling for a while now. But I think it could prove to be a good cautionary tale for other people out there.

Speaker 2 I've been a longtime listener of Let's Not Meet and Odd Trails. They're two podcasts that I never miss an episode of.

Speaker 2 For context, I'm a 19-year-old woman from Brisbane, which is the capital city of my state, Queensland, Australia.

Speaker 2 I'm very alternative, and not to talk myself up, I am a decently attractive woman.

Speaker 2 Fitness has always been crucial to my well-being, so I have a very pretty and unique appearance, as well as being being a fit person, but with a curvy body.

Speaker 2 Because of this, I tend to often attract a lot of unwanted attention.

Speaker 2 I was working as the head bartender at a fancy Italian restaurant in a very upscale suburb of Brisbane at the time.

Speaker 2 I had been working there for about three months when this happened. It was a busy restaurant, and we saw a lot of staff come and go due to the high-pressure nature of the restaurant.

Speaker 2 We were always looking for new dishwashers and kitchen hands.

Speaker 2 I had worked back of house as a cook in my previous job, so I was the only one on my team that was qualified to be working at the back of house area.

Speaker 2 Whenever we found ourselves low on staff in the kitchen, I was working in the kitchen in order to keep things running smoothly.

Speaker 2 Another important detail is that my manager, who we'll call Max, lived in a hostel just a few blocks away from the restaurant. And that's how I met John.

Speaker 2 Max offered John a job at my restaurant because John was struggling for money. John had the required experience and seemed nice enough on his trial night.

Speaker 2 And when I first met John, I was still doing my usual work as the bartender, but was asked to work in the kitchen with John for the following week, just so that I could show him the ropes.

Speaker 2 I didn't mind this whatsoever, that is until it came to having to work side by side with him.

Speaker 2 It started with uncomfortable stairs. My gym was right across from work, so I'd make my way over from the gym to my work and then I would get changed there.

Speaker 2 One day I went to work after going to the gym, and John was already there. I greeted him while I was still in my gym clothes.
I noticed him looking me up and down as he greeted me.

Speaker 2 This made me incredibly uncomfortable, but I shoved that thought deep down and I just got on with it, thinking that maybe I was mistaken. Then it escalated to him making odd comments.

Speaker 2 John and I were making small talk, talking about our hobbies, and I mentioned how I loved the gym, adding that it was one of the few things that kept me sane.

Speaker 2 He decided that it would be appropriate to respond with, yeah, I can tell because you've got a beautiful ass.

Speaker 2 I know I should have just told my manager about this straight away, but I had gaslit myself into thinking that it wasn't as bad as I thought.

Speaker 2 I told myself that I was being over-dramatic. These odd comments continued for two days.
He would make inappropriate remarks every so often, every single shift.

Speaker 2 Yet, despite my apparent disgust and discomfort, he continued. One evening we were standing at the sink, doing dishes, and making small talk as usual.

Speaker 2 Out of nowhere, he starts to tell me that he's been in prison multiple times. He had also been in and out of mental health facilities.
Now,

Speaker 2 I'm starting to panic, thinking, what the fuck, you're an ex-con?

Speaker 2 And you have blatantly sexually harassed me for the past two nights? What could this man possibly do to me?

Speaker 2 What if he decides to wait for both of us to be alone in the restaurant restaurant one night to assault me?

Speaker 2 I was freaking out, but I couldn't let him see that, so I kept my cool as best I could.

Speaker 2 My best course of action was to finish quickly and get out of there before him.

Speaker 2 He continues to talk about how he accidentally knocked up a woman, only to find out recently she has a four-year-old kid.

Speaker 2 I half-assed a muttered reply, trying to make it clear that I didn't want to talk to him any more.

Speaker 2 To my dismay, he pipes up again, completely unprompted, and what he said next made my blood run cold. You know,

Speaker 2 I've never seen such a beautiful dish before.

Speaker 2 I sure wouldn't mind putting a baby in you.

Speaker 2 I didn't say a word. What could I say? I didn't want to piss him off by telling him to shut up.
What if that caused him to try and follow me home home or worse?

Speaker 2 As soon as I was finished, I hastily grabbed my stuff from the staff area and bolted out the back door of the restaurant while on the phone with my 511 and incredibly well-built boyfriend.

Speaker 2 It was late at this point, but there were a few restaurants open. I saw one just about to close a little further up the street and I ran.

Speaker 2 Trying to run as fast as I could, the adrenaline coursing through me, it was causing my legs to turn to jelly.

Speaker 2 I can only imagine how startled the poor staff at this restaurant must have been to see me burst through their doors, shaking, out of breath, and on the verge of tears.

Speaker 2 I tried to explain the string of incoherent sentences together. I'll forever be grateful for those people.

Speaker 2 Once my boyfriend made it to the restaurant I was hiding in, I burst into tears.

Speaker 2 I didn't know if it was the reality of the situation hitting me or the feeling of safety once my boyfriend arrived, but either way I broke.

Speaker 2 My time at that upscale Italian restaurant didn't last much longer.

Speaker 2 Now I'm a survivor of continuous sexual abuse, so that incident, as well as the trauma that I had experienced earlier in life, has left an unwaveringly sour taste in my mouth.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry for the long story, but please let this serve as a warning to everyone. Trust your gut.
If someone says something that you're not comfortable with, tell your manager.

Speaker 2 Whether it's a co-worker or customer making you feel uncomfortable, it's their legal duty to keep you safe.

Speaker 2 To my beautiful boyfriend who came wielding a big-ass wrench ready and willing to protect me at any cost.

Speaker 2 And to the wonderful people in that other restaurant who helped me and comforted me during such a scary time, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 And to John, my disgusting ex-co-worker, who sexually harassed me and genuinely made me fear for my safety. For your sake, let's not ever meet again.

Speaker 2 The final story contains references to self-harm. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 This happened last year at a new job. This guy, Mike, was in charge of my training.
At first he seemed like a nice guy.

Speaker 2 We would talk about common interests and have lunch together normal things that co workers would do.

Speaker 2 Then one day he started to over share about things from his personal life, such as I hate my wife and if I told you I cut myself in a place only God and I can see, would you want to know where?

Speaker 2 Also, his wife was pregnant at the time.

Speaker 2 Keep in mind, I had known this guy for all of three weeks when he started saying this stuff.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, the most personal thing I'd ever shared was that I had been on Prozac in my first year of college, which I didn't think was a big deal since doctors prescribe it all the time.

Speaker 2 This is important to note, and you'll see why.

Speaker 2 Anyway, while I found what he was sharing to be odd, I didn't want to piss him off because I was concerned that, as my primary trainer, he'd start badmouthing me to the managers.

Speaker 2 So I did my best to change the subject whenever I thought he was going too far, which was becoming a daily thing. I also started avoiding being alone with him as much as possible.

Speaker 2 That didn't stop Mike from deciding to see me as his best friend or his sister.

Speaker 2 He even started referring to me as his sister from another mister.

Speaker 2 This was eventually cut short due to the point of him straight up calling me his sister in front of other people around the office.

Speaker 2 The first couple of times he did it, I just laughed, but then it stopped being funny because in his mind, it seemed like me being his sister was real, like it was a fact for him.

Speaker 2 He even changed his Facebook listing to make me his sister.

Speaker 2 I'd added him on there along with some other people from work, which was a big mistake.

Speaker 2 By this point, my actual biological brother was itching to have a talk with Mike, but I told him it really wasn't a big deal, and I let him know that I was going to try and gently remove myself from the situation.

Speaker 2 But gently attempting to do so just didn't work.

Speaker 2 I was having lunch with this other guy from work one day. We'll call him Blaine.
For a little bit of background, Blaine is a guy who completed the same course I did.

Speaker 2 He was in the course in a different year than I was, so we had a lot to talk about, and I enjoyed having someone around my age to talk to.

Speaker 2 As I was having lunch with Blaine, I could see that Mike was giving him the stink eye from across the room. He was eating alone and had a very obvious, look what you're doing to me, demeanor.

Speaker 2 That same evening, Blaine messaged me on Facebook and told me that Mike was messaging him over Slack about me.

Speaker 2 We used Slack to communicate at work, and some people have it on their phones to coordinate after hour stuff.

Speaker 2 Blaine shared screenshots of the conversation with me. Mike was saying, I'll protect her from scum like you until my dying breath.

Speaker 2 And If you break her heart, I'll break you.

Speaker 2 It was some of the most cringeworthy and disturbing things I've ever read from someone I knew in real life.

Speaker 2 Blaine then rightfully asked me what the hell was going on.

Speaker 2 Did you tell Mike that we were together or something? Blaine said. Because if you did, I apologize for sending you the wrong signals, because that's not the case.

Speaker 2 I was pretty pissed off. I wasn't just pissed because Mike was threatening one of the few friendships I had at work, but this was getting fucked up all around.

Speaker 2 So I messaged Mike, asking him to stop threatening Blaine, while also apologizing to Blaine about the whole misunderstanding.

Speaker 2 Mike messaged back,

Speaker 2 I'm just looking out for you. That's what brothers do.

Speaker 2 I then took a deep breath and replied that he's a very good friend, emphasizing friend, and added that I didn't need to be looked after.

Speaker 2 Mike came back with, then I'll just have to protect you from the shadows, with a winky face.

Speaker 2 He said some other cringy shit about me being young, naive, and an easy target, but by that point, I was 300% done with whatever he thought this was, so I blocked him.

Speaker 2 The next morning, Mike came in late, sat down, and immediately messaged me on Slack, asking if I was okay.

Speaker 2 I ignored it. A bit later, he got up to go out for his smoke break, and as he passed my desk, he said, Hey, I slacked you.
Did you see it?

Speaker 2 I used some generic comment about being busy, then went about minding my own business.

Speaker 2 Lunch came and went, and the rest of the day carried on without a word from him until ten minutes before I was about to go home.

Speaker 2 That was when I received a wall of text on Slack that made me realize that whatever was happening in Mike's head was completely detached from real life.

Speaker 2 In said wall of text, he was talking about how he thought I was lashing out at him due to being hurt and angry from all of my trauma.

Speaker 2 I assume he was talking about my depressive episode from years ago. He told me not to worry and said he'd continue to stand by his dear friend, meaning me,

Speaker 2 since he made a promise to be my brother and defender.

Speaker 2 He said he wasn't going to take the easy way out and let me go just because I was hurt. He even said he wanted me to take out my anger and pain on him because he could take it.

Speaker 2 As I was sitting there reading all of this, I couldn't believe it. Mike then logged off for the day as I was still processing everything.

Speaker 2 Then, about twenty minutes later, I went down to the parking lot, and there he was, smoking next to his car.

Speaker 2 I ignored him as I walked past. Thank God there were other people around.

Speaker 2 He just stood there, unmoving, and stared at me as I got into my car and drove away.

Speaker 2 This was when I started to think about talking to a manager. We had two managers, a younger guy and a woman.
We'll call them Pete and Pam.

Speaker 2 I started writing this long email to both of them, and also thought of talking to Blaine, who I figured could back me up since Mike harassed him after he had lunch with me.

Speaker 2 In the end, I decided not to. I thought about how Mike had a kid on the way, and he was clearly in need of some mental help that he didn't seem to be getting.

Speaker 2 I didn't want to get him fired and take away his livelihood. Spoiler alert, I lived to regret it.

Speaker 2 After the day that I ignored Mike in the parking lot, things were normal for a while. Sure, I caught Mike staring at me a few times, but I pretended not to notice.

Speaker 2 Then, after a few weeks of nothing, one of the other girls on our team said she had something to tell me. We'll call her Angie.

Speaker 2 So one day, Angie and I went out to a coffee place across the street that pretty much everyone in the building goes to for lunch.

Speaker 2 She told me that Mike had been talking to other coworkers about me and my hurt.

Speaker 2 He was telling some coworkers how I was struggling with depression. He said it was so bad that it was making me push my family away.
Because according to this psycho, we were family.

Speaker 2 He said he had been trying to help me, and it was breaking his heart that I wasn't letting him since he cared so much for me.

Speaker 2 Angie wasn't sure how many people he had been discussing this with, but besides herself, she knew he was talking about all of this with at least one other person. I was livid.

Speaker 2 Honestly, who goes around telling people things like this, making themselves look like a saint? This was when I had a change of heart and decided it was definitely time to talk to the managers.

Speaker 2 So I started with Pete. I opened up Slack and asked him for a quick one-on-one.

Speaker 2 He immediately agreed and said, that's great. I've been meaning to talk to you.
Pam will be joining too. So I need to get her down here.
So the three of us met later the same day.

Speaker 2 Pete started our meeting by asking me how I was doing. He asked how I was getting along with the rest of the team and so on.

Speaker 2 I kept things general at first, but I had a feeling of where this was going.

Speaker 2 Sure as rain, Pete then said, Mike's been saying a lot of good things about you.

Speaker 2 But his face wasn't the face of a man who had been hearing good things.

Speaker 2 All the while, Pam was sitting sitting there, hardly saying anything.

Speaker 2 She was just nodding and smiling in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable. I was starting to get very anxious because I'm not a confrontational person.
I hate drama.

Speaker 2 But Mike had crossed all of the lines.

Speaker 2 Still trying to be nice, I said, Look, I think I somehow gave Mike the wrong impression. And I gave them a scrubbed up version of what had been going on.
Pam asked, Did you ask him to stop?

Speaker 2 I wasn't sure of what to say since I hadn't, really, but I assumed that blocking him on Facebook and not engaging him on Slack or anywhere else otherwise was sending him that same message.

Speaker 2 Pam then proceeds to give me advice. She says, if he starts to talk about inappropriate things, tell him you're not comfortable with it.
Don't engage with him on a personal level. or outside of work.

Speaker 2 Pete and Pam concluded the meeting by promising that they'd assign someone else as my trainer, and they said that they would talk to Mike about spreading inappropriate rumors, which I insisted were not true.

Speaker 2 A week later, Angie and I headed out for coffee, along with another guy that we were friends with, at the office.

Speaker 2 As soon as we walked in the front door of the coffee shop, Mike was there holding two cups of coffee, and one of them had my name on it.

Speaker 2 Thinking back, I think he went there since he must have heard me and Angie talking about heading over there while we were waiting for our friend.

Speaker 2 I think Mike ran over there ahead of us while we were waiting for the third guy. Mike then tried to give me the cup of coffee with my name on it, and he said It's just the way you like it.

Speaker 2 My heart was racing so fast that I couldn't make out what it was. I was pretty sure I was about to have a heart attack right then and there, though it was probably a panic attack.

Speaker 2 By the time I got a grip, Mike was gone and Angie looked at me with concern as she said, Are you okay? You looked like death.

Speaker 2 I then went outside with Angie while our friend waited in line. I was shaking, trying not to cry.
She asked what was going on, so I told her some of the things that Mike had been doing.

Speaker 2 By the end of it, she looked disturbed and said that I should talk to managers. I told her that I already did, and she urged me to tell them about him approaching me at the coffee shop.

Speaker 2 Part of my brain thought that it wasn't worth bringing up, since he was just buying me coffee, but I also knew I couldn't continue pretending that I was okay with any of this anymore.

Speaker 2 As soon as we were back in the office, I went straight to Pam. Normally, I would talk to Pete since he's my direct manager, while Pam is more of a servicing manager.

Speaker 2 But I knew I'd feel more comfortable about all of this, talking to a woman.

Speaker 2 So, this time I told Pam everything, including how Mike threatened someone else after they had lunch with me. I also told her that he stares at me a lot.

Speaker 2 I let her know about that long, creepy, delusional message that he sent me on Slack, and she asked me to see the message.

Speaker 2 I said that I would forward it to her when I got back to my desk, since I didn't have Slack on my phone.

Speaker 2 She asked me to forward anything else I had, since she wanted to be able to fully understand the extent of the problem.

Speaker 2 She then asked Has he been following you outside of work?

Speaker 2 I told her about the coffee shop incident and also about his lingering and staring in the parking lot.

Speaker 2 After a pause, she said, Well, I know I can't fire him.

Speaker 2 And this made my heart sink.

Speaker 2 While none of this was serious enough for them to boot him, she said that he could be disciplined for using Slack inappropriately.

Speaker 2 She asked if I'd like to transfer to another team, but I didn't think that that would do much good since I'd still have to work in the same building as this psycho.

Speaker 2 So she suggested a mediation, a meeting including her, someone from HR, Mike, and me.

Speaker 2 She didn't sound very convinced that it would do anything, and I wasn't either. And guess what? It didn't.

Speaker 2 Let me start by saying I was very anxious throughout the whole thing. I was shaking.
I did my best to state that I wanted to have a professional relationship with Mike and only that.

Speaker 2 I said I wasn't comfortable with him sharing his perceived personal information about me or talking to other people about my quote-unquote problems, which weren't even real.

Speaker 2 Throughout this whole damn mediation, he was just sitting there saying, Yeah, uh-huh, okay,

Speaker 2 with this shit-eating grin on his face, like we were all just playing pretend.

Speaker 2 That same day, I got a Slack message from him, and it said, If you wanted me to give you some space, you should have just asked. No need to go to HR about it.

Speaker 2 I looked up and noticed that he wasn't sitting at his desk, but assumed he was probably still in the building somewhere.

Speaker 2 If he was sitting at his desk, I'm pretty confident, I would have lost my shit then and there. I replied, Okay, well, I'm saying it now.
Please don't ever talk to me again.

Speaker 2 To which he replied, but we work together, silly, with a winky face.

Speaker 2 Not long after the mediation with HR, my brother picked me up from work because my car was in the shop. My brother is a pretty big guy.
Even though he looks intimidating, he's not violent whatsoever.

Speaker 2 Well, as I got into my brother's car, Mike was in the parking lot smoking a cigarette and giving us the meanest look you could imagine.

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure he was waiting there for me to come out of the building that day. It wouldn't have been the first time.

Speaker 2 Mike's expression wasn't just staring any more, it was more like an I'll kill you in your sleep glare.

Speaker 2 My brother noticed this and simply asked, Is that the guy?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but just drive, I said.

Speaker 2 However, before I could stop my brother, he was already walking over to Mike. Mike was quick to get verbally aggressive as soon as he saw my brother coming.

Speaker 2 I heard him shouting from where I was sitting in my brother's car. Stop right there, or I'll run you over, Mike said.
I have a gun, bitch. I have a gun.

Speaker 2 This was when I completely lost it. I walked over and began screaming at him.
I've never in my life let loose on someone like this, and I honestly scared myself because of it.

Speaker 2 At some point, while I was screaming, Mike just drove off. I was hysterical for the rest of the evening.
I called in sick the next day because I couldn't stand the thought of being anywhere near Mike.

Speaker 2 While I was out sick, I received a text from an unsaved number that said, Bitch, just that.

Speaker 2 My brother was telling me that I should quit the job and get a restraining order against this freak, since it was obvious people in our workplace weren't going to do anything to protect me.

Speaker 2 No job in the world is worth dealing with all of this, my brother said. You could stay with me and my girlfriend for a while if you're worried about money.

Speaker 2 This was a good pitch, but my mind still wasn't made up. And then that same evening I received a picture message of a man slitting his wrists.

Speaker 2 You know the expression, go down the street, not across the road? Well, this was definitely across the road. And it was really messy.

Speaker 2 There wasn't a face included in the picture, but it was painfully obvious that it was Mike messing with me.

Speaker 2 I blocked the number, and I quit my job that next day. I also stayed with my brother and his girlfriend for a while.

Speaker 2 Mike never tried to get in touch again, or if he did, I never knew, because I blocked him on everything.

Speaker 2 However, that changed recently.

Speaker 2 You know how LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to see the people who looked at your profile? Sometimes it shows you their photo, even if you don't have a paid subscription.

Speaker 2 When I looked at who had been viewing my profile, I noticed that Mike had looked at mine. He was still with the company I had resigned from.

Speaker 2 Needless to say, I'm now freaking out, especially because I'm sure LinkedIn showed him I looked at his profile as well.

Speaker 2 If he happens to just walk by my current workplace or tries to initiate contact, I'm going straight to the police. Mike, please, let's never meet again.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening. If you have a story to share, send it to let's not meetstories at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 Be sure to check out the new episodes of my other podcasts like Odd Trails and the old time radio cast at crypticcountypodcasts.com.

Speaker 2 And if you'd like to get ad-free versions of all of our episodes at a higher bitrate, plus bonus extended episodes with stories you won't hear anywhere else, go to patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast to sign up and support the show today.

Speaker 2 This week you have heard Stalked by My Coworker Friend by KL, My Mom's Creepy Co-Worker by Julie, Crazy Coworker Who Stalked Me by Thor's Hammer0999,

Speaker 2 Co-worker Convinced Himself I Was Staring At him by Palpitation Queen, Co-worker by M.

Speaker 2 My Coworkers Tried to Drug Me by Rose Girly, Crazy Ex Coworker by Enzo, Damien by Kit Kat Monster, Creepy Coworker Turns Into Something Vile by Funky Disco Ball, Co-worker Turned Stalker, Turned Catfish by Craig, My Creepy Coworker by Willow, and finally my co-worker became my worst nightmare by Stockton Tennessee.

Speaker 2 All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors.

Speaker 2 Let's Not Meet a True Horror podcast is not associated with Reddit or any other message boards online. Again, if you have a story to share, send it to Let'sNotMeetStories at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 We'll see you all next week. Everybody, stay safe.

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