&gt;Asking someone on a date that isn&#x27;t interested in you is harassment.<p>Wow.  No, it&#x27;s not.  Not for normal people, anyway.<p>Normal person A: &quot;Hey, what do you say you and I have dinner one of these nights.&quot;<p>Normal person B: &quot;Thanks, but no.&quot; [TOTALLY OPTIONAL: &quot;I don&#x27;t think my girlfriend&#x2F;boyfriend&#x2F;wife&#x2F;husband&#x2F;... would like that.&quot;&#x2F;&quot;I have a strict no-relationships-with-coworkers&#x2F;vendors&#x2F;customers&#x2F;people-I-meet-in-the-gym&#x2F;... policy.&quot;&#x2F;&quot;That&#x27;s very kind of you but I&#x27;m afraid I&#x27;m not interested.&quot;&#x2F;&quot;Please don&#x27;t ask again and we shall never speak of this.&quot;]<p>Normal person A: &quot;No problem!  So, about that [situation-appropriate topic of discussion..]&quot;<p>A asked B on a date.  B was not interested.  No harassment was involved.<p>To be very clear, the above dialogue could have gone (and unfortunately all too often does go) differently.  Had A persisted after a clear refusal, that could very easily veer into the territory of harassment.  Furthermore (and I know this will be more controversial), B could have messed the above dialogue up too, for example by failing to give a clear and unambiguous &quot;no.&quot;   Does this place a certain burden on B merely as a consequence of A&#x27;s unrequited interest?  Yes, but part of being an adult is being able to say &quot;no&quot; to reasonable requests from other adults.<p>Strive be a normal person like A and B and it should be possible to ask someone on a date, or be asked on a date, regardless of context without fear or discomfiture.  (Note: situations of extreme power imbalance, e.g. professor&#x2F;student, boss&#x2F;subordinate, need to be navigated with extreme care.  Normal people refrain entirely, in such situations, from romantic overtures unless and until the mutual interest (it <i>does</i> happen sometimes) is blindingly obvious, and they then scrupulously avoid even the appearance of impropriety, e.g. by waiting until the end of the term, or transferring to a different department, or something.)<p>&gt;Calling someone a MILF is definitely harassment.<p>I&#x27;m not going to argue there.  It&#x27;s extremely offensive, at the very least.  Normal people don&#x27;t address other normal people, with whom they don&#x27;t have an intimate relationship, using sexual terms.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, it sounds to me like the female employee in this case was a model Normal Person (&quot;sure as friends in work context&quot; is about as unambiguous as you can get!).  If the sum total of the communication had been<p>A: Could we hang out?
B: Sure, as friends in a work context
A: May I tell you a secret?
B: No, sorry.<p>I would regard A as a Normal Person as well, and the dialogue as innocuous.  But I&#x27;m assuming A was inappropriately persistent&#x2F;insistent (not to mention the MILF part, which is inappropriate in itself) and the dialogue, no doubt, goes on from there.   So, yes, fire his ass.