I was a senior executive at a big famous company. Another big famous company reached out to see if we wanted to do a partnership, and so we had a bunch of meetings to figure it out.

On my side it was just me. On the other side were two men and a woman. Sometimes they would fly to my city and sometimes I’d fly to theirs. Over about six months, we had something like 15 meetings and dinners

Eventually the woman took me aside and told me that there was never going to be a partnership between our companies. Her company had decided months earlier that mine didn’t fit with their strategy. But her two colleagues had decided to keep the talks going anyway because, she said, they had decided I was hot. She said they would spend entire flights joking about which of them would get to have sex with me, and how they could make it happen.

She said the way they talked about me was disgusting, and that was why she was telling me. It had been bothering her for months, she said.

I’m embarrassed to say it, but when she first told me, honestly I thought maybe she was delusional, or had some kind of weird agenda. It seemed so ridiculous. But then I gave it some thought, and actually it sort of fit. We hadn’t been making any progress, and it did feel like their team had been kind of phoning it in.

I can’t remember how I wrapped up our talks. I just kind of wound things down, and they didn’t stop me. 

Afterward I was just amazed. I just marveled at them. It was so incredible. They had wasted so much time, so much money, for literally no benefit to anyone. It was unimaginable to me, like, I could not imagine a woman doing that in a million years.