Thursday, July 26, 2007

Confessions

By popular demand (ok, just wiwille) I'm putting another post up here. And this one contains a confession. Well, two.

See, the truth is, I don't do that customer service gig anymore. Haven't for quite some time. I've been posting from an archive of crazy emails that I took with me. And I'm running out.

I have one or two good posts, and maybe one or two ok ones, left. Only a couple of those are actual emails, and a couple are stories. And that's where we start today's real post, and my second confession.
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There were these emails we would get from this crazy lady named Mellisa. She'd send one a week or so. Why we didn't block them, I don't know. They were amusing, I guess.

Melissa's emails were completely incoherent, they would go on about computers and the conspiracy against her and her brother taking all of her belongings and Microsoft doing mind control on her and her dad making her smoke pot and all kinds of stuff.

While her messages got into "downright scary" territory near the end, earlier on they were kind of interesting in a "how does this happen" kind of way. I wish, I wish, I had saved some of them so you could see what I mean, but I didn't. This was before I decided to start saving these things for posterity (all the e-mails you have seen on this blog thus far were collected in about an 8 month period).

At the bottom of every email was a string of letters and numbers that at first didn't make any sense. We never paid attention to it, we just read her crazy ramblings. One day, I took a long hard look at it. It started with M and two other letters - her initials! Maybe this did mean something after all. And I looked across the line of text and realized what it was. An address. She was including her own physical address in every email. It was all run together and was missing letters, but it was decipherable.

And it just so happened that I was going on vacation in a couple of weeks - to the city where she lived.

I wrote down the address and took it with me. I didn't want to, but I felt compelled. On my last day in that town, after I packed up and was ready to go, I drove to the street in the address that was at the end of every email she ever sent us. I walked down the street to the address. It was a big building, and the door to the lobby had "Visiting Hours" and some security policies all over it - clearly some kind of care facility.

I walked across the street and took a picture of the place. Then I got in my car and headed home. Taking that picture was literally the last thing I did on my vacation. After my pictures were printed, I brought them into the office. When I got to the one of Mellisa's building, I told everybody what it was. Groans and accusations of ME being crazier then the nutjobs were thrown around.

I don't have the picture any more - it does no good without the emails to accompany it. But I still have the memory.