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I know it sounds silly, but this stems from an experience I had.

 

I used to work with a certain female colleague (let's call her Sherry) on a project team. From the beginning, this situation was rather strange, because the role and scope that I had was very similar to what the rest of my colleagues were doing solo, but for some reason, we were the only ones who were put on a team. Nobody else had a team and to be honest, what we were doing definately did not require a team, just one person. To top it off, I had been doing the same thing for roughly a year now so it wasn't like I was new to it anything. No explanation was given as to why I was the only one who had a team member, nor did our job scope or anything increase to account for the additional person. In other words, I suddenly found myself being told to split one person's workload for two people. It just felt very random and strange. At the time, I just guessed that they couldn't find anything better for her to do, so better for her to do something than nothing.

 

Anyway, the manager came by and had a short meeting with the two of us where he basically did the introductions (she was a new hire, but I would not need to train her) and explained to her what the role involved, etc. Everything was going well at this point. After the manager left, her behaviour changed. There were some upcoming interviews that I had to do, so I was planning to split the interviews with her and started to do a summary of the interview process, to make sure she was familiar with it. For some reason, she suddenly became very confrontational. She started to nitpick every single thing I said and kept questioning every step of the interview process.

 

Here's an example : One standard interview question is "Why do you want to apply for this role?" or some variant thereof. She said that question was unnecessary because we don't have many candidates anyway so we should just take whoever and skip the interview. I tried to explain that there was no way we could do that, but she just kept saying "I don't think that's necessary" or "We don't need to do that". Eventually, she dropped the issue, but she looked VERY unhappy while she did so. I couldn't figure out why, in the first place we were splitting one person's workload into two, so it's not as if she was being asked to do anything unreasonable.

 

Since she finally stopped with the objections, we were able to conclude the meeting and get back to work. The next day, after lunch, I was suddenly called into a meeting by another manager in the same department. Sherry was already there. The manager explained that at the request of the department head, he had been tasked to sit in on our meetings and act as a "facilitator". Sherry seemed very pleased as the manager continued explaining that this was because we were the only two member team and that the department head just wanted to ensure that we had smooth communication or some such. I got the distinct feeling that the manager was deliberately avoiding mentioning the real reason, especially since it wasn't my usual manager.

 

So somehow, a new hire on her second day gets the department head to intervene and assign a manager to sit in on our two person meetings. At this point, I figured that she knows someone high up in the company who is pulling strings for her, or maybe she filed some kind of complaint and said she felt unsafe or something so she needed someone to sit in our meetings. The meetings became very awkard. Sherry made sure to never address me directly unless she wanted to respond negatively to something that I said. Whenever she wanted to suggest something, she would look to the manager and show zero interest in whether I had anything to say. She made sure to act very professional and polite most of the time (although her mask slipped a few times), but whenever the manager had to step out to handle other business or was simply not available, she would revert back to being confrontational.

 

On paper, we had equal authority, but since she had a manager present, she did not need to discuss anything with me and just went directly to the manager for everything. The manager also seemed very reluctant to disagree with her (and always did so in a very polite and careful manner), even if she said something ridiculous or outlandish (she once wanted a goldfish tank in our office to "improve office morale", and the amount of money she wanted for it was insane).

 

Sometimes her behaviour resembled more like a gangster, once, I referenced an email exchange that I had another with another colleague and she rudely demanded to know the details, and kept repeating "Like what?" in a very aggressive tone. The manager just watched and said nothing, which basically confirmed my suspicions that she was untouchable for some reason. It got to the point where she would be sitting and chatting with the department head whenever our "team" was supposed to be setting up meeting rooms or moving material, the only time she was willing to do any work was when there was an audience watching. And once, she approved a purchase request of a few hundred dollars when neither of us had the authority to do so, did so without discussing it with me (of course) or anyone else, then tried to push the blame onto me by saying that she "thought" that I had already approved it. Fortunately, the emails clearly showed that she had it done it on her own, but even then, the only thing that happened was the department head telling her to be more careful in the future. This incident was never brought up again.

 

At this point, the fact that she was pulling strings like crazy wasn't even the main issue, it was how to get out of this situation without getting dragged into worse trouble like a sexual harrassment lawsuit or being blacklisted by the industry because she started spreading rumours. While technically, I could have gone to HR with the amount of evidence I had, I knew that it would just get shoved under the rug given the amount of pull she had and she would escalate it by claiming I sexually harrassed her or something, and I would be the one to get into trouble.

 

I eventually ended up quitting before I could find another job, and ran into my old manager at one of the cafes in the area. He was very cautious and made sure to avoid specifics, but apparently shortly before I left, Sherry had approached him (and possibly other managers) to voice "certain concerns" and "seek advice". He did not seem surprised when I told him what the "meetings" were like. He didn't want to talk about anything related to Sherry though, and quickly switched topics.

 

Now, I'm constantly paranoid whenever interacting with a woman whom I don't know well enough to call a friend. I'm constantly worried that anything I say or do may be used as an excuse to file some kind of complaint with HR and I spend far too much time backing up emails, keeping copies of documents, etc, "just in case". I'm terrified of being left alone in a meeting alone with a woman without any third party eye witnesses due to the massive risk that I am taking. When I tell this story to others, the reaction I get is largely typical : what a faggot, stop being a pussy, man up, you must be a misogynist, awww are you scared of girls, you must have been sexually harrassing her subconciously, some statement about a rape epidemic, etc, etc...

 

Whenever you read stories about some guy being falsely accused for rape or whatever and having their whole life destroyed, you think to yourself "that can never be me, he was just unlucky" (just like with cancer, nobody thinks they are going to get cancer), but after having such a close encounter, it really made me think that maybe the next unlucky guy will be me and it terrifies me.

 

How do you handle that? Have you had any similar situations?