Emilio

I've saved the biggest crazy for last. Unfortunately, I did not save examples of any of Emilio's e-mails, which is a shame. They made so little sense they seemed like works of art. If you knew why he wrote MS constantly, you could get bits and pieces, but you generally wished you didn't.

You see, Emilio, who lives in a South American country, believed he was in love with Gates's daughter. He believed he was engaged to her. This started when the child was around 3 or 4 years old. And he would write love notes to her. Creeeeepy.

It was enough to make you want to bleach your brain. The love notes were smashed in with crazy ramblings about the government, America, his upbringing (largely his father's marijuana habit and less savory things) and things no one could interpret.

By the time we in customer service had to deal with Emilio, his history was well-documented. Security and legal were both aware of him, and every e-mail he sent had to be sent to legal as an FYI. We were told never to respond to Emilio, only to forward his e-mails to legal. The few people who had dealt with him already used aliases so he wouldn't have their actual names, and he would bring them up in his e-mails. Which might go from "Hi [fake name here], how are you doing?" to "I had a dream last night that I raped you. I can't wait to come to Redmond so I can."

Yeah. He was scary. And he's probably the only person to carry the distinction of being included in our customer service training by name, with rules for handling just him. For all the nutjobs I had to deal with in that job, he took the cake as the craziest, and the scariest.