I am sorry, but this is a long one.

Tldr: Seemingly interested, Cute coworker asks for my number a day and a half after meeting her, claims to want to learn Linux from me. We go out to do that supposedly, but she ends up expecting us to do separate things until she can’t for reasons. We chat the rest of the night. No Linux lessons learned, no separate work done, she doesn’t appear interested in me in that way from what I interpreted. It was a fun chat and she wants to do it again. What the fuck is going on?

Long version: I work in the tech industry and I have a cute coworker I just met who I for the life of me cannot tell what it is she wants.

Back story: my company has two buildings close by to each other that works with servers. I can’t say what exactly we do but it isn’t super relevant. However, she works at one building and I the other. I had to go over to her building and help out as we were limited on work to do at ours. She is in a technical/managing role and I am a step or two below her.

When helping out, I meet her and she seems enthusiastic to have my help. That’s normal. However, throughout the day she starts to ask me about the tasks and is seemingly testing my skills as well as asking questions she may not have the answer to. We work on completely different systems at the two buildings so there are things to learn from both sides. She is also newish to her role.

First of all, she is really cute/intelligent and of course I am interested in helping her with her little side projects when the main tasks are done/waiting. So she keeps asking me for help on two person tasks. Cool, no complaints there. I am good at my job and she can see that. She seems to be rather friendly after the first day. I go home and have my weekend.

As we are slow still at my building, I volunteer to go help her building because I kinda wanted to see her again. So I ask a manager on their side and they are happy to have my help. She saw my comment about coming over in our work chat and “Hearted” it. I go over and start to help.

She tells me “it is so great to have you here, you make my job so much easier” in what can only describe as an appreciative sigh. Her current staff is new and still missing the skills needed to properly troubleshoot all the types of errors we have. Now, me being a Lemmy user, I have almost a decade of Linux experience under my belt like we all do. I tell her this as it is a very useful skill set in our line of work. She seems surprised and impressed, she wants to learn Linux. I offer if she ever wants to learn, I would be happy to show her.

A few hours of helping later, she walks up to me in the most focused expression I have seen out of her and she asks for my number and if I wanted to get together one day at a library and show her how to use Linux. I was quite startled she asked for my number because I was going to ask her the same thing later in the day. So I said sure, went to lunch dumbfounded and came back with my number on a sheet of paper.

She was very friendly to me the rest of the day. We work out a choice between Monday and Wednesday but she kept using the plural form of days implying this would keep happening.

Cut to Monday and we get together but she seems to want to work on her own thing while I do my own in proximity of each other? She ends up not being able to do her thing for some reason and so we just chat for the next few hours. It was a great chat, some of the most fun I have had in a while. However, she clearly didn’t expect to be doing that and seemed to be disappointed we couldn’t work on our own things and apologized for it.

She had fun, I could see she enjoyed our talk. However, what I couldn’t see was interest in me. You can sometimes tell when someone is interested by how they look at you and respond to the things you do.

The thing that bothers me is that I don’t understand what her goal was. Did she use the excuse of Linux to get close to me? Did she actually only just want to learn Linux and assumed there was no other purpose to our meeting? If so, why didn’t we just do that instead? Why did she want to get together to work on entirely unrelated projects? Why is she interested in doing it again?

I don’t know if I am just stupid and missing something. Maybe she really only just wants to learn Linux so she can be better at her job, she is the type of person to do that. It just bothers me that I can’t see much rhyme or reason in her actions. If she was entirely self motivated to learn from me only, then why not just do that? Why ask me for my number if you didn’t want to do the thing you suggested in the first place? I am just so lost.

Edit: princessleiascat reminded me of something. A week prior to me meeting her, one of my coworkers was learning under her when he went to go help out. Apparently a guy came up to her while this happened and asked her out. She turned him down for the reason it would be inappropriate for her to date someone where there is this power dynamic.

My coworker told me this and that might be the nail in my coffin. However, it is also possible she just used it as an excuse to not have to deal with turning him down more harshly. I could believe both things. Hense more confusion, why make an exception to hang out with me then?