In my last semester as a grad student, a postdoc I'll call the Mock Turtle was running the Princeton Number Theory Seminar. A professor I'll call Professor Gryphon told Turtle to ask the finishing grad students to give seminar talks.
Instead of asking me to give a talk, Turtle said to my significant other, K, "Alice doesn't want to give a seminar talk, does she?"
K told Turtle that if he wanted to know that, he should ask me.
So when Turtle ran into me in the department, he half-heartedly invited me to give a talk, and I accepted.
The seminar participants generally went out to dinner after the talk. Turtle told me that there wouldn't be a dinner after my talk, since I was a Princeton student. The problem wasn't that the department didn't have funds to pay for it, since participants always paid their own way, and I was willing to pay my share.
When I found out that Professor Gryphon was hosting a pizza dinner at his own house for another finishing grad student after his talk, I went back to the Mock Turtle and told him that I would organize a dinner for my talk, which just meant that I would choose a restaurant and announce it at my talk. Afraid that that would make him look bad, Turtle said that he would announce the dinner.
The day of my talk, I got a phone call from Turtle. "I'm on my deathbed," he exaggerated, pleading that he was so ill that there couldn't be a dinner after all.
I replied that I was sorry he was ill, and that he shouldn't worry about the dinner, since I would organize it.
Turtle then mentioned that he would introduce my talk.
"What do you mean? If you're on your deathbed, you're too ill to go to my talk!" I exclaimed.
"Oh, I'm not that sick," he replied.
Turtle not only rose from his deathbed to show up at my talk, he also came to dinner.
I have one recollection from the dinner conversation. Turtle eagerly told us that the secondary sexual characteristics of female humans (which, for him, meant the breasts) were prominent and colorful, which was not the case for the secondary sexual characteristics of men. He believed that that pointed to an important difference in the purposes of male and female humans, and he wanted us to discuss it.
This was really not something I wanted my colleagues to discuss in my presence, at the dinner after my very first research talk, when I was the only woman at the table. I wanted us to talk about the subject of my talk, namely Mordell-Weil groups of generic polarized abelian varieties, and I tried to steer the conversation in that direction.
Luckily, I've mostly managed to avoid interacting with Turtle since then, though I am concerned about his female colleagues and students, and how he treats them.
While revisiting this story still conjures up feelings of annoyance, I'm pleased that I've at last reached the stage where I can look back on it with mild amusement.