The Pepe Le Peu of co-workers Here's a story about former co-worker of mine, and how his serial unrequited passions never failed to trump his better judgment.
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I first met "Donnie" 11 years ago when I began working at another publishing company. I was hired to work on a project to create a new database out of four or five old ones.

Donnie is short, stocky, and hairy. And he was considerably less sophisticated than most of my co-workers, all of whom except him had at least one degree. He was a total Scarborough boy, which is kind of an urban redneck – he lived and breathed sports, rock music and beer in a particular, lowest common denominator sort of way. Time and time again some of my co-workers would be trying to discuss music or movies intelligently and he'd get in there with a, "That band SUCKS!!!!" and the conversation would just die. I remember Donnie showing up at work day after day dressed in sports jerseys and ball caps and jeans, accessorized with a brass-bound hard-sided briefcase (which only held his lunch and a Stephen King novel anyway as we didn’t take work home).

Donnie had gone to the University of Toronto as he often mentioned, but hadn’t lasted a year. He got the job at that company because his mother worked there. To be fair, he knew more about computers than most of us and so he definitely kept the job on his own merits.

His interpersonal skills and level of self-awareness left something to be desired, however. He’d preen and say he was the “fourth most senior person on the project”. Or he’d say things like, “Speaking as an anthropologist -” on the strength of having taken and received an A for a single course in anthropology at U of T. A’s must have been rare and strange things for him. He’d go on about how in debt he was though he still (and had always) lived at home with his parents, rent-free, and didn't even have or need a car since his mother brought him to work every day.

He came from an extremely close knit family. Perhaps somewhat too much so. His parents were first cousins, and he was not shy about announcing the fact that his family tree was rather... intertwined.

Anyway, he asked me out. I said no, as tactfully as I could. Perhaps too tactfully, as he kept asking me out at intervals. And subjecting to me to a number of uncomfortable incidents, such as the time he sent me an email in which he laid it all out, saying “he’d never felt this way about anyone for a long time” and “thought about me all of the time”.

Then there was the time we all went out to a pub night and he kept trying to cosy up to me all night, and asking me how I felt about dating a younger guy. I lived quite close to the pub and I was terrified he would try to walk me home and possibly try for a big kiss goodnight at my front door, so later in the evening when he went to the bathroom or something I seized the opportunity to grab my trench coat, wave goodbye to everyone, and zoom out of there. After sprinting a block in my high heels, I was just about to slow down and breath a sigh of relief, when, to my horror, I heard the pitter patter of little Doc Martens on the sidewalk beside me. I glanced reluctantly to my left… and of course it was Donnie. Fortunately I used the excuse of “needing to take the subway” (though I didn’t, it was just one short stop) to get rid of him.

Possibly worst of all was the time he published a wretched love poem in the project newsletter. The newsletter was something gotten up just for fun. Most of us submitted some little item or other. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of what was in it now. I submitted a top ten list of things to do for rent money once the asshole company we worked for terminated our contracts - they kept repeatedly renewing our six-week contracts for two years and we never knew how long we would have work. (“Dig out your old university papers and sell them to somebody named Clyde No-Thumbs. He’ll sell them to some over privileged and underenlightened brat who will then be promoted over you, but the less you know about that, the better. And you thought all those good study habits would never pay off!”)

Someone wrote fake horoscopes. Someone else wrote a movie review. Babs (the same Babs as in this thread) contributed instructions for giving a cat a bran bath. Donnie submitted an excreable poem called “Shy”. It went something along the lines of “Shy, shy, shy/Don’t know how to say what I feel/Shy, shy, shy/I love you from afar/shy, shy, shy/let me see the beauty you possess” – well, you get the idea. I figured it was about me because he’d just asked me out again very recently.

A couple of days after the newsletter came out, Donnie wasn’t there one day, so a bunch of people were standing around on break making fun of the poem. One guy read the thing out line by line, pausing after each line to offer personal commentary and/or interpretations. When he read out the line “Let me see the beauty you possess”, he commented, “That means he wants to see her naked.” Outwardly I was composed and said and did nothing. Inwardly I was reacting with a big “AAAAAAUUGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!”

For quite a long time I had told no one any of this as I didn’t want to embarrass Donnie. THEN after some time (I worked at this company for four years) I learned that Donnie made a practice of chasing women at work. He had pursued "Madeline", who also worked on the project, despite the fact that she had been seeing the same guy for four years and got married shortly after. Maddy had a little fun with Donnie though. He was trying to impress her with how much he knew about wines. Maddy is a gourmet cook and knows a quite lot about wines and liqueurs. So she asked him, “Do you like [brand name] red?” though there was no red for that brand name, only a white. Without missing a beat, Donnie said, “Oh, it’s the BEST!!!”

Unbeknownst to me, everyone teased Maddy that the poem was about her. It may have been. Donnie definitely did recycle his material. He also chased my friend "Lacey". We’ve compared notes on the lines he used, and we basically heard all the same ones. In Donnie’s brain “not having felt this way for a long time” apparently means “not since earlier that day”. Though, thank whatever powers that may be, I was at least spared the worst line of all, which was “Your face is the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night.” Which forced poor Lacey into the realization that she was almost certainly being used as masturbatory fodder.

I left that company for my current job seven years ago. About six months or so after I started work at my present company, I got an email from Donnie. After some mental vacillating, I decided it was best to just not reply. I said to Lacey that I felt rude about just ignoring someone’s email, and she said, “I’m sure he’s used to it.”

Last I heard Donnie is still at that company – which is not a good place to work - and still lives at home, though he is now about 31 or 32. And he’s still chasing uninterested and attached women at work. Foolish, foolish horndog.