Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Okay, yes, unrequited love hurts. A lot. But still... you acted stupidly.

You were told that you weren't supposed to contact her.

Doesn't matter if that's fair or legal or whatever. It's simply a bad idea to "bring up the HR issue" when walking home alone. And your conversation was probably very short mostly because it was extremely uncomfortable for her.

Shortly after that you're wondering what's happening now. Instead of asking HR, you're texting your co-worker again!

Then there's lots and lots of petty squabbling about semantics and exact meanings of terms in your "restrictions" (where you actually do have a point or two – but it simply doesn't matter. You're not supposed to talk to her!).

Yes, you totally contacted her again and again, but "it was a groupchat!". That's totally different. Not.

If you ever get into such a situation again: take HR's warnings seriously. The second after you stepped out of the first meeting was the second you should have realized "I'm in big trouble, deservedly or not, I need professional help."

Maybe a lawyer, maybe a friend, maybe even a therapist. What do I know? But you definitely did not need those knee-jerk reactions. "Hey, let's find a loophole where I can convince myself it's okay to contact her".

Yeah, this post reminded me of the semi-regular /r/legaladvice posts along the lines of "my ex-GF got a restraining order against me so I drove to her house to ask her why and then the police arrested me" where the poster just can't seem to grasp that they violated the restraining order. Even his own description of the events have him clearly violating his agreement with HR several times and possibly violating it many more, so of course he's going to end up getting fired.

I don't know how you pull unrequited love out of such a vauge post. If we are to make that leap of assumption, it's a tiny additional inference to say the root cause was at least one of them was unable to mange the interaction line an adult (pursuer wouldn't take no for an answer and/or perused didn't bother to shut it down properly).

HR conversations basically take the American inability to be direct and multiply it by 100. Are we going to assume that HR of such a large company gave him the 30 seconds of real talk he needed to hear and possibly fix the situation, or run-arounds that assume their inability to communicate can be fixed by using their position of power to wield parent-knows-best control over the people? A state of affairs that feels insulting to people who know they need parental guidance, let alone adults. No wonder it ended like this.

HR's mind was made up in July. They should have fired him in July.

There was probably not enough ammunition (i.e. documentation) to avoid a wrongful termination issue, or Google gave the person the benefit of the doubt and and issued a warning as a documentation point.

In any case the person in question should have started looking for a new job at that point as the relationship is damaged, or resigned if they had the financial resources to do so.

And they thought it was a good idea to go to the holiday party after being fired and escorted out...

That was probably the most mind-boggling thing in the entire post. How could they possibly imagine that was an appropriate thing to do? (And, for that matter, how could someone else at Google think it was appropriate to offer a ticket under the circumstances?)

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