The Homeless Woman Who Lived in the Upstairs Office Cubical

Ordinarily I don’t use real names. I prefer initials and aliases. But I am so going to post her real name because I feel I should warn folks. The homeless woman’s real name is Melissa Rushing. She might be blond but she’s dyed her hair a good bit and the color I saw on her was funky, though consistent. She’s around 40 I think, but she’s lies (more later) and she is obese. There is nothing keeping her tied to this place so it is very possible that she could appear in any part of the US. Now you are warned.

I met Melissa at work and people treated her badly and made fun of her and since I didn’t know her at the time I thought people were just mean to her because she’s fat. I thought this was unfair and she seemed okay whenever I talked to her so I became her friend.

The first clue I had that anything was wrong with Melissa was when she cheated the plant manager. She was a temp and she worked on Christmas Eve for a few hours. Those four hours were all she worked for the whole week and Blaine felt sorry for her so he gave her 4 hours of holiday pay (time and a half). Except payroll messed up and gave Melissa 40 hours of holiday pay.

She kept it.

Now I can sorta see her point- I’m poor myself so I would loath to give up a big check. But she had to know that someone in accounting would catch that mistake and they did and they demanded that she give the money back. Melissa felt that since the company made the mistake she should be allowed to keep the money even though she hadn’t done anything to actually earn it. Besides, she couldn’t pay it back because she had already spent it. Blaine solved that problem by taking a percentage out of her pay every week until he got it all back. This royally pissed Melissa off and I heard this story because she was complaining about how unfair Blaine was and she’d never again do anything he asked.

Had I been the supervisor, as soon as I got my money back I would have called the temp agency and told them I didn’t need the thief anymore. But in the interim the production manager hired Melissa permanently. Obviously he didn’t check with anybody before he did it. Melissa had been a temp for nearly two years and had worked in almost every department and it just seems strange that no one ever hired her.

So now I knew that Melissa was not too honest. I still didn’t know she was crazy. I decided she could just be a work friend, one of the people who you talk to at work just to have someone to hang out with on breaks but you never see them outside the office. I’m really glad now I made that decision because if Melissa knew where I lived she’d probably stalk me.

The problem with crazy people is on the surface they seem fine. You don’t know how bad they are until you get in deep and then it’s a little too late to make them back off.

Melissa’s done so many crazy things I don’t even know where to start this story. She claimed to still be a virgin. I asked about this and she told me she’d had sex once in the ‘80’s and it was such a bad experience that she decided to never do it again. I can’t really grasp that concept. I love sex. My first time wasn’t great either but I decided I could do better so I really wanted to try it again, not give it up forever. Melissa says she swore it off, but really she was more preoccupied with sex than a nympho. One morning Allen (alien bait guy) came into work and went to boot up his computer. It was already on. The screen saver was on. Thinking he just forgot to shut it down, he moved the mouse and got a picture of a chick in black leather underwear holding two very large dildos. Allen freaked and started shutting the computer down while looking over his shoulder every five seconds to make sure the boss wasn’t coming.
He ranted and raved about it. ‘Some freak on nights is using my computer to look up porn!’ At work when the computers are rebooted the screen name of the last user appears on the log on prompt. It was Melissa’s user id. Allen started locking the computer but his coworker Bret wasn’t as careful and he came in early one day and caught Melissa looking up porn. That happened 3 more times (Either Bret was slow or he liked looking at porn, too.) The last time he caught her she was trying to print it out. Except she couldn’t figure out which printer to use, so instead of sending her porn to the regular desktop printer she sent it to our label maker. It wasn’t on at the time so nothing happened until 10 am when Bret tried to make box labels and got a whole roll of naked ladies.

I’m sure you’re wondering how she got to be homeless. I think I’ll just go with that story and not say more even though I could write a whole book on Melissa. But truthfully I’m a little worried that if I keep mentioning her she might appear. That happened once after she was (finally) fired. I was doing an odd job on night shift because I really need the overtime and I saw Melissa standing in the hallway. She was standing by the time clock and looking around with interest like she wanted to see what had changed while she was gone. She had on a lab coat and a hairnet and I think she intended to go on the production floor (we do make containers for food and have to abide by FDA regulations). She might have already wandered around the plant, though I don’t know why I didn’t see her earlier. Anyway, she was on one end of the hall and I was on the other and I was staring, unable to believe she actually came back when it occurred to me that Melissa might look up and see me. And then what would she do? I hurried into the lab, anxious to avoid trouble.

Melissa got fired for insubordination. That’s the official reason. There was a lot of other stuff going on and since I worked so closely with her someone asked me about it every day. Sometimes I think all that talking manifested her. You really got to be careful about what you say because your actions follow your thoughts and so does the course of the Universe. If you worry about bad stuff all the time it comes true. I’ll have to make my next post about magick so I can explain all this properly.

After Mark hired Melissa and gave her a raise she decided she needed to move into a better apartment. She was living in what used to be an old hotel on a state highway. The hotel had been remodeled into ‘efficiency apartments’ I’m not really sure what that meant, but I assumed it still looked like a cheap hotel room. She told me she was tired of living in a cramped space and she wanted to get away from the mental patients.

Huh?

This remodeled hotel was like a halfway house for people who had been released from the mental hospital. They lived on their own there to determine if they could make it in the real world. Let’s think about that for a minute. If you were a sane person, why would you chose to live in the same building with people who had been declared fruit loops? And why would you even be able to rent one of those apartments? Wouldn’t the only renters be people from the county mental ward? I think Melissa was locked up at some point and that’s where she was sent. I can’t come up with any other logical reason for her to rent that apartment, no matter how cheap it may have been.

So Melissa moved into a real place. That was right after Thanksgiving. Just before Christmas she paid off her car. Now the car was a Volvo station wagon and quite the lemon. She didn’t like it and I understand that because it left her stranded several times. But what she did was extremely stupid. The week after she paid off the Volvo she bought another car, a champagne colored Sebring.

Everybody told her not to do it. We all tried to talk her out of it. We all said she needed to wait a little while and save some money first. She wouldn’t listen. Melissa HAD to have another car. So she ignored good advice and bought that car from the same dealer she got the Volvo from and it was the first car she looked at and she didn’t test drive it. The dealership ran her credit and that’s when the bill collectors started calling.

I hate to do this, but it’s late and I still have a lot of story to tell. I’ll post more later.