On Stalkers

Hmmm... I've got a stalker.

Okay, okay, pipe down already. I may be a bit of an attention junkie, but I assure you that I'm not making this up. Besides, it's not that big a deal.

Don't think that I can't hear you laughing over there, Marcelle.

I've had her since either December 2004 or January 2005, I think. If I'm to believe her, she stole my number from a scrap of paper that I entrusted to someone regarding a random product order. (You can bet that I'm not going to use that service again, yes.)

She sends me messages over the cellphone, and I can't find reference to her name or number over the Web, so I'm guessing that she's not the tech-savvy sort. She even calls every now and then, letting the phone ring for two seconds before hanging up. (How she expects me to answer her during these exercises, I don't know.)

It seems that she likes my voice. And she thinks that I look good in a shirt and tie. And she likes my smile. (The latter sounds very odd, considering that my smile seems to frighten animals and small children, to begin with. To each his own, I suppose.)

Having a stalker feels strangely gratifying, in a way. Sometimes it feels nice knowing that you have suddenly become all the world to somebody, for no good reason at all. That's not to say, however, that it isn't more than a little annoying at other times.

I stopped answering her after her first few messages. I did make sure to tell her that the number she was calling was my 'work phone', though, so at the moment I'm ignoring her until she figures that maybe I switched numbers or something. Of course, it's been three months since then, and she's still calling. One should never underestimate the degree of human density, I think.

She gets a lot of points for persistence - at one time when I thought that she had finally given up, she started sending me messages at the rate of one every three days. These entries read like the usual gibberish that passes for text messaging among the general populace - pretty much all abbreviations and little substance.

Now, if she had contacted me via e-mail, then I probably would have answered her. The Internet does a fairly good job on protecting one's anonymity, and I could always delete her messages or block her addresses if they start becoming more than a little invasive. She contacts me via cellphone, though, and it's altogether too much of a possibility to determine a subscriber's identity and home address depending on what strings you can pull. So I don't answer her, and hope that she goes away.

The entire scenario gives me a very good position for observation, though. It's another aspect of the human character that I can incorporate into my scribblings... although to say that it's weird would be a likely understatement.