Yup. And the instruction was to simply ask out any woman, even if the OP knows she’ll say no, just to get his numbers up. Doesn’t matter anything about her, just ask out random women. A bus, where the woman is stuck sitting next to you until she gets to her stop or leaves early to get away from you. Yeah, that’ll make you not seem like a creep.
Transfer. ( Get Out Of There! ) if you are asking us, you are already over the edge of the cliff… and you can no longer trust yourself. Don’t end up on a commercial for ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’. Kinkos makes resume copies cheaply.
A total stranger? Someone whose cart you innocently bump against while shopping. Are you advocating going straight from “Excuse me” to “May I buy you a coffee to apologize for my clumsiness”?
I suppose some women may find that charming in a romantic comedy film sort of way, but I’d wager >51% of them will think you’re some kind of Pick Up Artist and get away from you ASAP.
As for asking out a stranger on the bus? The one time in my youth I tried to even make eye contact with a woman on the bus, she looked me straight in the eye with an expression of disgust until I turned away.
It’s your railroad, Jim. If you have a thing for your sister, Dagny, well, I wouldn’t speak about it. I mean, what would Wesley Mouch say?!?!
(Sadly, I think she has a thing for that Francisco guy. Been seeing her with Rearden as well.)
Just want to add in here that while I know this doesn’t work for everybody, IME continued proximity to somebody who’s either not interested or not appropriate makes the crush wear off faster than if I’m not around the person. Person who broke up with me and was then on the other side of the continent and entirely out of touch? Years of inchoate yearning for, basically, a fantasy of that person who wasn’t around to counteract anything about the fantasy. Person who broke up with me and was part of my immediate friend circle so that I saw him several times a week? The yearning reduced itself to vague regret within a few weeks.
If your head works anything at all like that, then leaving the job, or even avoiding the person, isn’t necessary. Just put it firmly in the category of ‘this thing exists but I’m not going to do anything about it’ and it may well wear off. (But agreeing with everybody else: make sure you don’t do anything about it!)
I’m sympathetic! I often get crushes on co-workers. Some of my strategies:
Tell myself “Down, boy!”
Repeat, inside my head, “Unhelpful. Unhelpful. Unhelpful.”
Try getting a little obsessed with some public figure who I’m never going to actually be around, as a substitute that is easier to manage.
Try breathing very consciously, and looking at the thoughts as more frustrating than anything else.
Now, as to some of the other posters – jeez, don’t be so harsh! The OP already said “nothing will happen”. We have no indication here that his behavior needs some kind of policing. I’ve had lots of crushes, and as far as I know, nobody was ever the wiser. As long as we’re in that territory, what we can do here is ease the feelings.
Oooo, yeah, that’s a good point.
I’m reminded of the time a younger female friend gave me some beautiful framed art she had created, with a very touching message on the back. I showed my spouse when I brought it home, and my spouse asked if she was married. I think I gave the wrong answer: “Yes.” The right answer would have been, “Dear, I’m married. And, yeah, she is too.”
It was all fine, but it’s always important to know when you’re getting close to an edge.
Well, I think you need to have a certain amount of emotional intelligence about it. Approaching a woman while she’s rushing to work, maybe not the best time. Striking up a conversation with a woman casually browsing your local book store or farmers market on a Sunday afternoon is fair game.
The OP is asking about “coping” with something that exists entirely in his head. He’s not dealing with an ex girlfriend who works at the same company or even a coworker he hooked up with after a drunken happy hour. So why “leaving the job” is even mentioned as an option to be excluded seems absurd to me.
Unless the purpose of the OP is simply to vent about the attractive coworker (he hasn’t followed up since), what is the OP worried about? Is he such a natural ladies man that it’s actually a challenge to NOT hook up with women he likes? Is he worried about getting a massive erection while giving a PowerPoint presentation while she’s in the room? Has he already purchased patterns for making a suit out of her skin?
In fairness, “massive erection” is a relative concept…
‘Fair game’? Funny, because if I’m browsing books, I don’t consider myself ‘fair game’.
This. That phrasing makes it sound like you’re out hunting for something to eat for dinner.
[ETA: ‘you’ being msmith537 who originally used that phrase, not SanVito.]
Of course you can try to strike up a conversation with somebody in a bookstore – if their behavior indicates that they’re interested in conversation, and if you actually want to have a conversation with them, and if supposing that you get a one-syllable answer and/or the person turning away you go away. But talking to somebody with their nose in a book when the only motive you have for doing so is getting laid is probably not going to come out well. And it’s annoying. Why do you think you’re entitled to annoy people?
I sell at farmers’ markets. People talk to each other all the time. They don’t, generally, appear to be hunting for “fair game”; they talk about the produce, or the weather, or how good the raisin oatmeal cookies are, or how well behaved (occasionally the reverse) somebody’s dog is. Whether sometimes multiple such conversations over a period of time eventually lead into ‘want to grab a cup of coffee around the corner at the diner?’ and/or into ‘want to grab my ass back at my place?’ I don’t know, but I expect occasionally they do; but none of that is remotely similar to coming up to a stranger who’s trying to decide which tomatoes to buy and cold asking them out, even if that’s preceded by a sentence or two about the tomatoes. If that’s what you want to do, go to a singles bar, go to a dating site.
A lot of the responses here seem to assume the OP has a crush because he’s single and lonely. But IME crushes don’t result from loneliness – I’m happily married yet, once a year or so, find myself suddenly crushing on a female coworker.
Much of the upstream advice has worked for me: be 100% professional, do not seek extra contact, do not flirt even just a tiny bit. Remind yourself that keeping the job is far too important to fuck it up over a crush.
It eventually passes.
And yet, somewhere here, reading a book in public appeared as actual advice on how to meet people at university. From, if her comments and profile were correct, a woman. Do I need a citation?
The advice in this thread has strayed in to “find another woman to fix what’s wrong with you.” I stand by my initial advice: get over it and someone else gave good advice here, “grow up.”
The work place is the adult world, it consists of men and women. Learn to navigate this adult world without making your inappropriate feelings someone else’s problem.
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I think what you need is the context of the comment.
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You also need the context of the body language of the reader.
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“Meeting people” is not necessarily the same thing as asking for a date.
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Women are not a monolithic bloc all of whom must agree on anything. Therefore, even if you found the citation and it turned out that that specific woman meant that asking people out cold based on the fact that they were reading a book was a good idea, that wouldn’t require me or anyone else who would be ticked off by it and/or skeeved out by it to agree.
ETA: madmonk28 has a point. The solution to desiring somebody when it’s not appropriate to do anything about it isn’t to plug another person into the vacant space. It’s to recognize that these things happen, the desire doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you, but nevertheless you need to not do anything to further it.
You interpret, “I’m not a homewrecker”, as “leaving an opening”?!! 
This is why I’ve always admonished girl friends in this situation who, in an effort to be thoughtful, tell me that they “don’t want to be cruel”. I tell them, “No, instead, you want to be so gentle that you leave them with false hope and yourself with more headaches.”
Just blow him up and get over with! It’s actually kinder in the end.
This is good advice and I would add that if it happens in the workplace, document it; you might need it later.
Are we still doing “phrasing”?
Please note that my OCDness was untreated then and I was a bit nuts. :o
Plus I’m a nerdy guy and thus clueless. Any guys in this thread who have clues, I envy you.
I agree that finding someone else is bad advice.
But I also think these aren’t good advice, but for a different reason. Not because they are incorrect, but because they don’t actually tell you what to do. They aren’t actionable. Which is why the are most often given as insults.
“Learn to navigate” is also not helpful. It’s like someone someone bringing up a math problem and the answer being “learn math.”
Other advice in this thread has been better: treat her strictly professionally, don’t make excuses to be around her, and waiting for it to past all are things I think are great. The last part is especially big: crushes don’t last unless you deliberately fuel them, in my experience.