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 - we'd talk about common interests, have lunch together, normal things coworkers do. Then one day he started to overshare things from his personal life like "I hate my wife" (who I knew was pregnant at the time) and "if I told you I cut myself in a place that only God and I can see would you want to know where?"

Now keep in mind I'd known the guy for all of three weeks when this started happening and the most personal thing I'd ever shared was that I'd been on Prozac in my first year of college, which I didn't think was a big deal because doctors prescribe it like candy. (This is important, you'll see why.) Whatever, I didn't want to piss him off because what if he started badmouthing me to the managers? Still, I did my best to change the subject when he went too far, which was becoming a daily thing. I also avoided being alone with him as much as possible.

That didn't stop Mike from deciding that I was now his best friend/sister. He started actually referring to me as "his sister from another mother" and then just "his sister" in front of other people from the office. The first couple times he did it I laughed it off, but then it stopped being funny because in his mind this was now a fact. He even tried to make the relationship official on Facebook (I'd added him along some other people from work - big mistake). By this point, my actual (biological) brother was itching to have a talk with this guy, but I told him it wasn't a big deal and I'd try to gently extricate myself from the situation.

Well, gently extricating myself didn't work. I was having lunch with this other guy from work in the cantina one day. Background: this is a guy who finished the same course I did (different year though), so we had lots to talk about and I really liked having someone around my age to talk to. Anyway, I could see Mike giving him the stink eye from across the room (he was eating alone, in a very obvious "look what you're doing to me" display). The same evening, Other Guy messages me on Facebook telling me Mike's texting him over Slack about me (we use Slack at work and some people have it on their phone for out of hours stuff). He shows me screenshots of the convo. Mike basically saying shit like "I'll protect her to my dying breath from scum like you" and "if you break her heart I'll break you". This is some of the most cringe and disturbing stuff I've ever read from a I actually know IRL. Other Guy rightfully asks me what the hell is going on, did I tell Mike we were together or something?.Because if I did, he apologises if he sent me the wrong signals but we are most definitely not together.

I'm pretty pissed by now, not just because this is threatening one of the few friendships I have at work but because this is fucked up all around. So I message Mike asking him to stop threatening my friend while also apologizing to Other Guy over the misunderstanding. Mike texts back "I'm just looking out for you, that's what brothers do." Okay. Deep breath. This is happening. I message him telling him that he's a very good friend (emphasis on 'friend') but I don't need to be looked out for, really I don't. He comes back with "then I'll just protect you from the shadows" and a winky face. He says some other cringe shit about me being young and naïve which makes me a target (what.) but by this point I am 300% done with whatever he thinks this is so I just block him.

The next morning, Mike comes in late, sits his ass down and immediately texts me on Slack "are you okay", which I ignore. Bit later he gets up to go for his smoke break and as he goes past my desk he says "Hey I Slacked you, did you see?" Yeah, I saw but I'm not doing this anymore. I pull off some generic "sorry, I'm busy" line and mind my own business. Lunch comes and goes, the day goes on without a word from him until about ten minutes before it's time to go home, when I get a WALL OF TEXT on my Slack that basically makes me realize that what's happening in Mike's head has absolutely nothing to do with real life. Zero. Sweet fuck-all. He thinks I'm lashing out because I'm hurt and angry because of my "trauma" (I assume he's talking about my depressive episode from years ago). He says he'll stand by his "dear FRIEND" because he made a promise to be my brother/defender and he's not going to take the easy way out and let me go just because I'm hurt. He actually WANTS me to take out my "pain and anger" on him, because he can take it.

I'm sitting there reading this and all I can think is "what the fuck".

Mike logs off for the day as I'm still processing all of this. I go down to the parking lot some twenty minutes later and there he is, smoking next to his car. I ignore him as I walk past (thank God there are other people around) and he just... stands there unmoving and staring at me as I get into my car and drive away.

This is where I started to think about talking to a manager. We have two managers, a younger guy and a woman. Let's call them Pete and Pam. I started writing this long email to both of them and also thought of talking to Other Guy to back me up (remember, Mike had harassed him over having lunch with me). In the end I decided not to. Mike had a kid on the way and he was clearly in need of mental help which he probably wasn't getting, I wasn't about to get him fired and take away his livelihood. Spoiler alert... I lived to regret it.

Things were, dare I say it, normal (or so I thought) for a while after. Sure, I caught Mike staring at me a few times, but I pretended not to notice. Then after a few weeks of nothing, one of the other girls on our team says she has something to tell me. Let's call her Nice Girl because she ended up helping me a couple times after that. So Nice Girl and I go out for coffee at lunch (there's a coffee place across the street that pretty much everyone in the building goes to). She tells me Mike has been talking to other coworkers about me and my "hurt". How I'm struggling with my depression and it's so bad it's even making me push "family" away. (Because we're practically family if psycho says so, right?!) How he's been trying to help me and it breaks his heart that I won't let him, because he cares for me so very much. How many people has he been talking to? Nice Girl knows about at least one other person. .

This makes me LIVID. You can't just go around telling people someone else is mentally ill just to make yourself look like a saint. I mean who does that?! Now it's definitely time to talk to the managers. I slack Pete (the younger manager) asking for a quick 1 to 1 and he immediately agrees and says "great actually I've been meaning to talk to you, Pam will be joining too just need to get her down here" (Pam's on a different floor). Crap. Oh well, I guess this really is happening. So we meet later the same day and Pete starts asking how I'm getting on, if I get along with the rest of the team and so on. I have a feeling I know where this is going. Sure as rain, he says "Mike's been saying lots of good things about you..." but his face isn't the face of a man who heard good things.

All the while Pam is sitting there not really saying anything, just nodding and smiling in a way that makes me a bit uncomfortable. I'm starting to get super-anxious because I'm a nonconfrontational person usually and I hate drama but Mike crossed ALL the lines. Still trying to be nice I say "look, I think I gave Mike the wrong impression..." and I give them a whitewashed version of what's been going on.

At this point Pam asks me "Did you ask him to stop?" Well not really, but I'd assumed blocking him on FB and not engaging him on Slack or offline sends the same message. Pam then proceeds to give me bullshit advice like "if he starts to talk about inappropriate things, tell him you're not comfortable with this" and "don't engage with him in personal circumstances or outside of work" (what does that first thing even mean). They also promise they'll assign someone else as my trainer/mentor and they'll talk to him over spreading inappropriate rumors, which I insist again are not true.

Another week goes by and Nice Girl, myself and another guy who's friends with her are all heading out to get coffee. As soon as we walk in the door of the place THERE'S FUCKING MIKE with two cups of coffee and one of them has my name on it. (Thinking back he must have heard me and Nice Girl were going out and ran ahead while we were waiting for the third guy...) He tries to give that one to me and says something about it being just the way I like it but my heart is racing so fast I can't make out what it is and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a heart attack there and then (it was probably a panic attack). By the time I get a grip, Mike's gone and Nice Girl is looking very concerned asking if I'm okay and saying I look like death. We end up outside while Nice Girl's friend is waiting in line, I'm shaking and trying not to cry. She asks what's going on so I tell her some of the things Mike's been doing.

By the end of it she looks disturbed and says I should talk to the managers. Well, I already did. She says "Tell them about today." Part of my brain stupidly thinks "but he just wanted to buy me coffee..." but I can't really pretend I'm OK with any of this anymore.

As soon as we're back in the office I go straight to Pam (normally I'd talk to Pete since he's our direct manager and Pam's kind of a supervising manager but I feel more comfortable talking to a woman about this). This time I tell Pam EVERYTHING. Including how Mike threatened someone else over having lunch with me and how he stares at me a lot and he sent me a long and creepy text on Slack that proves he's delusional. She asks to see the text, I say I'll forward it (I don't have Slack on my phone). She asks me to forward everything else I have, not that she doesn't believe me but she wants to fully understand the extent of the problem. She says it with the same knowing/understanding smile from the last meeting. She also asks me "Has he been following you outside work?"

Now she already knows about the coffee incident and I also tell her about the staring in the parking lot. There's another pause, then she says "Well obviously we can't fire him" and my heart sinks, but apparently this isn't serious enough for them to boot him, though they can discipline him for using the company Slack inappropriately. She asks if I'd like to transfer to another team, but I'd still have to work in the same building as the psycho. Finally she suggests a mediation – a meeting including her, someone from HR, Mike and me. She doesn't sound very convinced it'll do anything and neither am I to be honest, I'm panicking just thinking about talking to him again.

Did I agree to mediation? Of course I did. Did it help? Of course it didn't.

Let me just start by saying I was super-anxious throughout. I was literally shaking. I did my best to state in neutral terms that I want to have a professional relationship with Mike and only that, and I'm not comfortable with him oversharing personal information or talking to other people about my 'problems', which aren't even real. Throughout this whole damn thing he was sitting there saying "Yeah. Okay. Uh-huh." with this shit-eating grin on his face, like we're just playing pretend. The only time he had any other reaction was when I indirectly said he'd been making stuff up about me. He said something like "Well, you kinda told me that, remember?" As if that would make any of this okay!

The same day I got a Slack message from him saying "If you wanted me to give you some space you should've just asked, no need to go to HR about it". He wasn't sitting at his desk but he was probably still in the building somewhere, otherwise 'm pretty confident I would've lost my shit then and there. I sent back something along the lines of "well I'm saying it now. Please don't ever talk to me again." To which he replies "But we work together, silly!" and a winky face.

This is already pretty long so I won't detail everything else that happened. Not long after this HR mediation thing my brother was picking me up from work one day because my car was in the shop. For a bit of background, my brother is a a pretty big guy, but he's a non-violent person even if he looks intimidating. I'm getting in the car and Mike is there too, smoking in his car and giving us the meanest stinkest look you can imagine from a person. (I'm rpetty sure he was waiting there for me to come out of the building, it wouldn't have been the first time). This isn't just staring anymore, it's "I'll kill you in your sleep" staring. My brother notices and asks me if this is the guy. "Yeah but just drive" I say, but before I can stop him he's already walking over.

Mike starts getting verbally aggressive as soon as he sees my brother coming (I can hear him shouting from where I'm sitting in the car). He's getting nasty, saying shit like "N___ stop right there or Imma' run you over" and "I have a gun, bitch, I have a gun." (FWIW Mike is a pasty white guy and about as far from "gangsta" as apples are from broomsticks) This is when I LOSE IT. I walk over and just start screaming at him. I've never in my life let loose at someone like this, before or since, I honestly scared myself that time. At some point Mike just drives off while I'm in the middle of it. I was hysterical for the rest of the evening and I called in sick the next day because I couldn't stand the thought of being anywhere near this person again.

While I was out sick I received a text from an unsaved number saying "bitch". Just that. My brother was already telling me that I should quit the job and get a restraining order against this freak because it was obvious people in the workplace weren't going to protect me. No job in the world was worth dealing with something like this, right? I could stay with him and his girlfriend for a while if I was worried about money. My mind still wasn't made up but the same evening I received a picture message of a man slitting his wrists. You know how they say "go down the street, not across the road"? This was "across the road" but it was really messy and bloody. I couldn't see a face in the picture but it was painfully obvious that this was Mike fucking with me. I blocked the number and quit the job the next day. I also stayed with my brother and his gf for a while, but Mike never tried to get in touch again (or if he did I never knew it, because I blocked him across everything). That is until last week.

You know how LinkedIn has this "People who looked at your profile" thing and sometimes it shows you their photo even if you don't have the paid subscription? Well last week I saw that Mike Stalker had looked at my profile. He's still with that company. Needless to say I'm freaking the fuck out, especially because I'm sure LinkedIn showed him I looked at his profile too. I started writing this as a way to keep track of everything that happened between me and Mike, because if he does or says ANYTHING, if he happens to "just walk by" my current workplace or if he messages me, I'm going straight to the police. But since I've been a long time lurker on this sub I thought I'd post here, too. So Mike, let's not meet again, ever.

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