The World According To Anne Arky

Call 5: In early February, Kristi left me yet another golden message, telling me that I need to stop following her all over town and tell my girls to stop following her and to call her PI, etc., etc. I called her PI AGAIN and reminded him that I had asked him last month to tell her to cease and desist calling me; he said he had not seen her to tell her. I told him I want him to CALL her RIGHT NOW – I have the number – and tell her. He said I can’t tell him what to do, his work day is over, and he is not calling her tonight, he will call her tomorrow. I said to see to it that he does, because his work day may be over, but her calling me is not, and she keeps calling me to tell me to call him, and he needs to tell her I have called him before I file a stalking charge against her; he said I may HAVE to file charges against her. Gee, that’s encouraging!

As soon as I hung up with this charming man, I called and filed another police report. An officer came and took a report, listened to most recent phone call (says he didn’t have time to hear the extended dance version of the whole tape), advised me to go to the county Magistrate’s office, get a TPO (restraining order) and block her number on my phone. He asked me how to spell her first name, and I said I didn’t know – there are about 28 ways to spell Kristi, and since I don’t know her, I don’t know what her way is. Then a bit later, he asked me, “What does she look like?” I threw up my hands and yelled, “I don’t KNOW! I have never seen this woman before in my life! That is my whole point!” After listening to the most recent message (still on my voice mail), he asked, “She’s a white female, right?” I said, “I have no idea. I have never seen or met her.” He tried her phone number from his phone to tell her to leave me alone, and he got voice mail, did not leave a message, said he will file this report.

Call 6: The next day, Kristi called yet again, with more of the same delusional ramblings and accusations of my girls and me following her everywhere and using devices and so forth and so on, and this time she told me I had promised to help her (NOT!) and that God would want me to help her. (Probably not as much as he would want her to stop calling me.) [Don’t you just love when people attach God’s will and wants to their agendas?] She gave me another phone number, which I still wasn’t going to call, but later found to be quite useful. About 45 minutes later, I called her PI AGAIN to see if he had called Kristi yet; he said that he had just gotten off the phone with her and told her not to call me again, and she said she wouldn’t; I asked him if he had told her that I am not the person she is looking for, and he said yes, he did, but she said I am lying. I said “Okay” and hung up. I don’t care if she thinks I’m lying. She can think I came in from outer space on a blue horse if she wants to (I certainly think she is an alien life form of some kind), so long as she leaves me the hell alone, right?

Labels: Nutty Neighbors

Call 4: In mid-January, I got yet another message from Kristi, telling me that I need to make my girls stop following her, that they have now gotten an apartment in the North Georgia town where she now lives (about 100 miles north of where I live) and they are using their devices [sic] to harass and follow and bug her. She told me that she is a nice person (yeah, right) and she used to be in law enforcement and then had a career in adult entertainment, but now she is a real estate closer and works at O’Charley’s. (Anyone out there needing a real estate closure with a lap dance and handcuffs, here’s your girl!) She told me this has been going on for three years, because her baby is almost three, and I need to make my girls stop and call her PI and more of the same. Considering that I had just barely been in that house for two years, I didn’t see how I could possibly be the person she is convinced is doing something to her. But then, who needs reality when you have such an active fantasy life?

I called her PI that night and told him to pass on to her that I don’t HAVE Tammy or any girls, I don’t know Kristi OR Tammy, and I don’t have either the time or the inclination to fight with my neighbors. I don’t know who she is or what her problem is, but I don’t want any part of her dramas and traumas, real or imagined, and I don’t need a real estate closure with a lap dance and a pair of handcuffs. I told him that not only do I not have any girls, but that the only other living being inhabiting my house was male and feline, and he can’t even be accused of having pooped in her yard, because he is an indoor cat. I am single, divorced, no kids, working two jobs, and do not have time to deal with this garbage. I told him to tell her to cease and desist calling me because I don’t want or have any part of this and she needs to leave me alone. I told him that in the event that someone is actually doing these things to her (which I seriously doubt), I’m just as sorry as I can be and hope that something can be done about it, but that I have nothing whatsoever to do with it, and at best, this is a case of mistaken identity on her part, and at worst, she’s just plain delusional. He said he would tell her, and for the first time, I knew what her last name was after he told me.

Labels: Nutty Neighbors

Call 2: In November 2006, after almost two years of silence, I got a call one Sunday afternoon while I was talking to my mother. The call waiting kicked in, but the caller ID didn’t, so I took the call. To my everlasting shock, it was herself – Kristi the nutcase neighbor. She said she had been trying to find me, she had to move but she was not thrown out. She has a private investigator because of “that girl Tawny who has been harassing her”. I told her I was talking on long distance, she asked me to call her back, I agreed (although I had no intention of doing so), she kept on talking, I said give me the number NOW, I cannot talk to her. She gave me her PI’s phone number and her cell phone number. This marks the first and as yet only time I have ever actually spoken to her. (Oddly enough, as calendar driven as I am, it wasn’t until I was going back over my notes and recounting things here that I realized that this call took place on the twenty-third anniversary of the last time I ever laid eyes on or spoke with Mike. Oh, well – you know me – every day is an anniversary.)

Call 3: Two days later, I got another message from Kristi, so it looked like this time she was going to continue what she had started lo those twenty months ago. I bought a cassette recorder and some blanks, came home and recorded the first one from my office voice mail and the second one from my home voice mail. She was still giving me phone numbers to call, but frankly, I was afraid to talk to her. I figured if she could manufacture this bizarre scenario of my watching and stalking her out of nothing more than my having moved into the neighborhood, I could only imagine what kind of thing she could come up with based on a real conversation, especially since I have no use for such nonsense and would probably call her every four-letter word I know but “nice” once she started spewing her ridiculosities. I had no intention of talking to her if I could possibly avoid it, and I hoped that if I kept ignoring her, she would just go away. Considering how well it had worked so far, obviously that was a foolish thought, but hope springs eternal.

Oh, well. If wishes were horses…!

Labels: Nutty Neighbors

I have something unusual going on right now that, in point of fact, has really been going on for two years now. Or at least it started two years ago, and then lay dormant for twenty months until this past November. Since November, it has escalated to the point that I have had to involve The Authorities. The reason I never blogged about it in the first place is because the first episode took place about two weeks before I launched Anne Arky Ology, and I figured it was a non-issue.
Somehow or another, I have acquired a stalker, and very soon, we are going to court.

Call 1: I moved into my house in November 2004, and spent the better part of the next two months working on putting up Christmas, with a lot of GMHT thrown in. The following two months, I spent taking down Christmas, with a lot of GMHT thrown in. Combine those, my two jobs and a fairly active social life, and even if I were so inclined, I didn’t and generally don’t have time to harass my neighbors. At that time, I didn’t even have time to know who my neighbors were. So you can imagine my surprise when I got this really strange, out-of-the-blue phone call on my voice mail from someone claiming to be not only my neighbor, but my neighbor who (she says) I have been stalking.

Although I am listed in the phone book, at that time my very new phone number had not come out in a new phone book yet, and I have the Privacy Director feature which stops any number from reaching my home or voice mail if it doesn’t identify either a phone number or a name. Somehow, she found out my name, my phone number and the code to bypass my Privacy Director, and she left a message that sounded so ridiculous, I almost felt like it was made by a delusional teenager. She introduced herself as Kristi and alleged that we all (the cat and I, I guess, since that’s what “we” consists of at my house) had been watching her and making her nervous and I had been talking about her to other neighbors, saying that she didn’t have a husband (like who gives a rip?!) and that she talks tough (she thinks she does, anyway). She said that we all had been making her so nervous that she and her baby had had to go to a motel and stay, and that she used to be in law enforcement and that if she caught us watching her tonight, she will file charges. The whole thing was so silly, but there was just enough of an undercurrent of threat that I decided to call the police and file a report. Not that I expected them to do anything other than, perhaps, pat me on the hand and tell me it would all be all right and not to worry my pretty little head about it. That’s about all they did, and I felt better, hoping that she would be watching me and see that I had invited the cops to come for a visit.

Because my voice mail at home generally drops off saved calls after about five days and I wasn’t sure if I would need to keep her message, I called my voice mail at work and recorded it there, since I didn’t have a cassette recorder handy at the time. I left it there for almost two years (I told y’all I’m a packrat of the first order).

A few months later, I became friends with a neighbor whose teen-aged son was mowing my lawn. I called one evening to tell him to come and pick up his check, and she (his mom) and I began talking. She gave me the lowdown on a couple of neighbors to avoid, and why, and I asked her if she knew anyone in the neighborhood named Kristi and if so, where does she live? She said that Kristi had lived across the side street from me, and that she was truly a nut job, but she had just moved out, thank goodness. Oh, yeah – I vaguely remembered seeing a moving van, but didn’t figure I would be that lucky. She proceeded to tell me of an event that happened a couple of years before, when her son was 14. He had taken a business card to Kristi and asked if she would want him to take care of her yard. A few nights later, he and his mother were at the grocery store about 9:00, and Kristi called him on his cell phone and said that there was someone outside her house watching her and asked him to come and protect her. He told her, “Ma’am, I’m just a 14-year-old boy. If you need protection, you should call the police.” I should think that in the time she lived in our city, the local police would have amassed a file three feet thick on this nutcase. Boy, was I glad she had left the neighborhood! Hopefully, I was through with her!

Not so fast, there.

Labels: Nutty Neighbors

At long last, I have returned. I bet you didn’t even know I was gone, did you? Sorry for the prolonged absence, but I got quite busy with numerous projects, chief among them being Christmas. I started Christmassing in mid-October and finished in mid-February, although if you think I am late, my friend is even later – she just bought a Christmas present for me this week. Of course, that could be construed as really, really early, but it isn’t. So anyway, here I am with at least one new story to tell, and probably lots of others.