Reflecting on my own strange year at Uber

If the story is as presented, that's a shame and I'm sorry that happened to you.

That said, it's really a story of doing the wrong thing at nearly every turn. Why date someone on your team, you admit you knew better.

HR is not your friend or there to help you, they are there to protect the company from litigation. A coworker being short is not going to raise any flags. Her claims of harassment, in a company known for it, absolutely is - regardless of whether it's actually true or not.

Dating people at work is very common.

I definitely agree that HR is not your friend and not there to help you. Once they contact you about a complaint, your first move should be to get an employment lawyer. That lawyer will help you document everything and respond to situations (especially in the case where coworker contacts you again). You will still be terminated by the company, but getting the lawyer involved early will get you a severance package instead of terminated for cause.

This is rarely worth it, especially in a case that's so incredibly devoid of evidence like this one. The lawyers will also take a huge cut of a severance obtained this way.

OP can't even articulate what exactly justified his original complaint in the first place, even if he didn't voluntarily delete the evidence.

Uber is generally in the right here. Maybe he was owed unemployment (which he eventually received), but companies are not obligated to deal with employees who appear to be the constant source of friction. This was all 100% instigated by OP and he didn't document in any way to the company that he was legitimately disabled (if he had a pre-existing diagnosis he wouldn't have needed to go to the company tele-therapy service).

The company even accommodated his HR complaint by moving him away from the person he filed a complaint about to a different office...and of course that's when he starts complaining about the commute.

IDK, sometimes people who are the victim are just not actually the victim. I'd love to hear the coworker's side of the story for how that date went.

I hypothesize that, from the coworker’s perspective, OP made an HR complaint out of left field and maybe it was her mission to get him fired after that. As we can see from the article, he has a deep misunderstanding of how corporate HR works, and he almost certainly isn’t realizing that HR has already determined that she is the victim, not him - through this process they have “probable cause” to not trust anything he says related to the subject.

Think about it, he’s even trying to make an ADA reason to be assigned back to the SF office. I think HR didn’t buy the reasoning behind that at all: it looks like he’s trying to get close to her again.

> During this period, I was instructed to delete her contact and the text messages between me and her from my phone. I complied, as I was scared to lose my job. Those messages, which would have been favorable to me on the question of who initiated what, are now gone.

This is so weird. I can't imagine a company instructing their employee to delete their personal correspondence. It's such an overreach, it doesn't comprehend.

> OP can't even articulate what exactly justified his original complaint in the first place, even if he didn't voluntarily delete the evidence.

I made it pretty clear in my post that she was consistently disrespectful towards me, even going so far as to say in front of coworkers at a team event that she was "surprised that I read." Reverse the gender roles and see if your opinion changes.

> He didn't document in any way to the company that he was legitimately disabled (if he had a pre-existing diagnosis he wouldn't have needed to go to the company tele-therapy service).

I provided evidence to HR/ER that I had been previously in-patient hospitalized for OCD and severe major depressive disorder, and that I had been seeing a therapist outside of Uber for the last four years. I only transitioned to the Uber therapist around the time HR got involved because it made more sense financially.

> The company even accommodated his HR complaint by moving him away from the person he filed a complaint about to a different office...and of course that's when he starts complaining about the commute.

This was because of her HR complaint, not mine. I did not want to commute two and a half hours round trip to Sunnyvale. That's absurd.