With Nate's new post up I was gonna hold off on this another day or two, but it was just enough to get me interested and then he goes all Burke on us. Finish a friggin' story, will ya.
Anyway, this is a quick tale of an awesome call I took Thursday evening. I would have posted it that night, but I had a couple of days offline while we waited on the cable company and then this weekend was a whole lotta lazy so here we are.
Call starts with the usual greeting and the lady jumps right in rattling off the phone number for her attorney with the insistance that I must call him so he can handle the situation. I can call out if I have to, but I don't have to for some shit like this so I use the "inbound dialer" excuse. She rattles off something about her cell phone and five other landlines being tapped by the Palm Beach (Florida) County Sheriff's Department over an incident in which she was falsely arrested. They've also locked the handset and stolen two or three others, not to mention the overages they've run up on her account. Plus, they've broken into her home numerous times using information they received from ADT about her security system. There's also something about a call she made from a payphone on October 30, 1997, but that wasn't fully explained.
Unfortunately, this woman's promising career as a corporate attorney has been railroaded by the collusion of the Palm Beach Sheriff and the FBI (or the FCC, she was somewhat confused on the issue) and she is also afflicted with a particularly nasty case of post-traumatic fibromyalgia. But there is hope, as both Janet Reno and William Jefferson Clinton (that's what she called him, so she must be a close, personal friend) have been informed of these horrible circumstances and are working diligently to rectify the situation, as is the Attorney General of the state of Florida. I considered warning her that if she sees ATF agents surrounding her home to get the fuck outta there, but I decided she probably has enough to worry about as it is.
According to our caller, the Miami Herald and various local network TV affiliates have been appraised of the situation, along with the former President and his Attorney General, so I hope I'm not breaking any major national scandals here at Science Gone Mad. Although between this and Ron's battle with frat boys over health insurance at Gator U, we could bring the entire state of Florida crashing to the ground.
The point of the call was that her phone wasn't working and she wanted to know why. Probably because the bill hadn't been paid in two months, which was clearly the result of nefarious misdeeds on the part of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department. I guess if you'll tap someone's phones, steal and lock their handsets, run up overages on their cell phone bill, and repeatedly break into their house, stealing their mail isn't a stretch. She decided to leave the phone disconnected as the easiest way to catch a thief is to leave your bills unpaid.
At this point the call was destined to come to an end, although I could have listened to this woman's tales of woe all night, but not before she left me with this valuable piece of advice: "you mess with a Jew, you are through."
Truer words have never been spoken.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Goddamn crazies
2 comments:
That's awesome. I only have two or three really good paranoid folks that I work with, and only one has a delusion that law enforcement is out to get him. He made some attempt to get his story out to Oprah ... that was pretty cool.
She was also doing the "yeah" thing, where she sticks "yeah" in and at the end of sentences randomly, kind of like Rain Man or I think one of Kevin Nealon's "Crank Yankers" skits.
I enjoyed that call immensely, though, because I find delusional people fascinating. What it must be like in that woman's head is unimaginable. There was guy that would come into the Sunoco like that, but he didn't seem so much paranoid as just on another planet. One night he was rambling about Edgar Allen Poe calling someone's wife on the phone...inexplicable stuff.
At the same time, becoming delusional like that scares the unholy fuck out of me and it has for some time. There's a bit of mental illness in my family tree and last year when I was having those panic attacks and anxiety problems I was worried that I was going off the deep end.
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