Flash from the Past

I spend too much time thinking these days. Maybe it's the end-of-the-year thing, or it could be the lack of really good stories about weirdness at work inspiring me to drag out some of the best stories I-never-told-on-this-blog (yet.)

There a about a bajillion of 'em, and all of 'em qualify as Flypaper for Freaks. And, in all honesty, some of them still cause me to either giggle, or cringe.

This one is a cringer.

Shortly after we opened, they hired a girl named Katy. She was all of 19 and looked to be about 12. She was a spastic little chipmunk (think Hammy in the movie Over the Hedge), and she was, without a doubt, weird. Some people called her crazy, but I know crazy, and she wasn't it. She was WEIRD.

So, she was (and still is) referred to by many in the store as Weird Katy.

She irritated most of the people who worked there. She irritated customers. One of my favorite "Thank God I didn't have to deal with that" stories about her was when they stuck her at one end of the store, on register, and after about 2 hours, there were dozens of people coming to the customer service desk demanding their change. Naturally, the people at the desk had no idea what these people were talking about. Turns out, she ran out of change in her register, and instead of picking up the phone and calling the person who could bring her more change, she just told cash customers she didn't have change, and they could go to the customer service desk to get it. (She wasn't, unlike most new people, afraid of the phone OR the PA, because she was constantly paging, instead of dialing a number, whenever she needed anything. Then, all of a sudden, this one night, she was apparently off her meds and VIOLA! no phone calls. Those managers should have known something was up to not be answering her pages for hours.)

Anyway, I thought, at one point, that she had a crush on me.

I'm not the friendliest person around, and yet, there she was, ALL.THE.TIME. It was like I was in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, as Spike, the bulldog, and she was the little yippy dog that bounced around him saying, "Hey Spike, hey Spike, hey Spike" ALL.THE.TIME.

If I ended up on register near her, I'd notice that she would be sayingto her customers, word for word, whatever I was saying to my customers. Including whatever inflections I'd give the words.

It was creepy. She made my skin crawl.

Then, I went on maternity leave (and that's the Howler.) When I got back, 3 months later, they pulled me aside and said, "If you work with Katy, watch, and if you see her following Nick, or if she talks about him, or anything kind of stalkerish regarding him, let us know."

My response was two-fold: "First, who is Nick?" (He was hired while I was off. They had to point him out to me.) and "Thank God!" Eyebrows went up "I thought she had a crush on me! At least she's found someone else and will leave me alone now."

I actually made it a point, later, to THANK this Nick guy for saving me from being the object of her affections.

Turns out, she actually was stalking him--in a non-threatening, creepy, chipmunk sort of way. She'd follow him around the store, even when she was supposed to be at her register. She followed him home after work one night--going in the opposite direction of where she lived, in order to know where he lived. He apparently lost her in the dark, when she didn't know if the dirt road he turned down was a driveway, or just another dirt road. Then, Weird thing that she was, she came into work and told him (and several others) about it. One time, his parents came in shopping, went through her line, and mentioned that they were his parents. I was told she followed them out to their car, and creeped them out, too.

She quit a few years ago. She got weirder before the end, doing strange things like talking to nobody, and when she was told to clean and paint some of the shelving beams, she slopped water over them, price labels and all, then immediately slapped paint over them, price labels, water, and all.

Some of *her* customers still come in and try to look at my boobs, or just in general creep me out.