The End

I’m going to do my best to get this story wrapped up today because quite frankly I’m tired of remembering this stupid shit. Once was enough. Also lots of things have been going on here. I mentioned that we got snow. The day before the snow we had a tornado. My hometown made the weather channel. My cousin Eddie called my parents to see if they were okay and I guess he didn’t believe them because he drove down here (an hour and half drive for him) I didn’t know anything about the tornado while it was happening. I just thought we were having a bad storm with lots of lightning. Kevin told me it was going to snow the next day and I didn’t believe him because it was just muggy hot, but I thought I should go to the store just in case. We’ve had freak snow before. I wanted to take a shower first, but I had to wait for the lightning to stop. When I got out my mother had left me a voice mail asking if I was alright. The tornado passed by them but didn’t touch down. I am less than 10 miles away and the wind barely picked up here. Today is nice but I still have snow on my porch which is in the shade where the sun can’t melt it. The snow has frozen over and I have been trying in vain to clear the porch so the dogs don’t break my neck as I try to walk them. If any of you have a quick way to get rid of snow tell me about it. I’ve never been outside the South and I am clueless.

So on with the homeless woman story.

Of course with the garnishment Melissa’s take home pay was considerably less and she needed to make some changes. Now bear in mind she had plenty of warning- this built up for weeks. She had time to save up, cut unnecessary items, make arrangements, etc. She did nothing. So when it came time to make a choice between her house and her car, she let the apartment go.

I’m sure some of you are feeling sorry for Melissa right now but don’t bother. I say this for 2 reasons- 1.) Several people tried to help her. Shelly offered to give Melissa half her house. Melissa turned her down because Shelly had animals. Just one cat and two outside dogs, but Melissa made it sound like a pig sty and she had never even seen the house. Jane said Melissa could stay with her if she bought her own food and Melissa said she couldn’t afford it but she was already buying her own food. Every night Melissa went to the store and got several TV dinners and put them in the lab fridge. She ate them all in one night and the next day she’d buy more. It would have to be cheaper to take up Jane’s offer. Shirley said Melissa could stay with her totally free and Melissa turned her down because Shirley lived two towns over and Melissa didn’t want to drive that far. But she drove all over the county every day looking for places to park her car. So that brings me to the second reason I don’t feel sorry for Melissa that’s because I think she enjoyed being homeless.

It wasn’t just Shelly, Jane, and Shirley, lots and lots of people offered to help, even people that didn’t like her and Melissa turned down everybody. Melissa told me she’d been homeless before. If it happened to me I would want to make sure it never happened again but apparently Melissa enjoyed roaming about town every day hunting for food. I’m not sure how much of the story is real. Melissa embellished a story with every retelling until it no longer resembled the original. But anyway, she told me she had been engaged (yeah right) to a solider from Virginia. She moved up there to live with his family until he got back to the states and then he dumped her over the phone. Since she was no longer engaged to the son the family kicked her out and it took Melissa ONE WHOLE YEAR to get back to Alabama.

I asked why it took so long and she said she left her car here in storage. I asked why she didn’t drive it and she said he told her she didn’t need it anymore. I asked why she didn’t get on a plane or a bus and she said she didn’t have any money. I asked what she was doing in Virginia for a year and she said nothing much. I asked where she lived and she said around different places. Finally she got an odd job, scraped up some cash, and got home. She immediately went to get the car and it wouldn’t start so she gave it away. I was just flabbergasted. ‘Melissa, didn’t you know the battery was dead?’ She just shrugged, said she didn’t know much about cars and the person she gave it to seemed happy to get it. And I was like, well duh, you gave her a perfectly good free car. Even if she sold it for $500 she still came out way ahead. Melissa didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about so I gave up.

I question if that even happened, but on the other hand Melissa did so many stupid things so it sounds like her. She got fired once for sexual harassment. I mean she was the harasser. She first told me that she accidentally brushed against a male co-worker and he made a big mess out of nothing. Then she became friends with a 15 year-old boy she met in the mall and she made sexual advances towards him. So after she showed me the text message she sent the boy about dreaming of him in a leather thong (and confused as to why he wasn’t calling her back) I saw the sexual harassment story in a new light.

Then there was the guy at the gym. In order to be able to shower every day Melissa joined a gym. She didn’t lose any weight, and if anything she seemed to eat more, so I guess the gym was strictly for shower room privileges. One day she came in raving about a ‘hot guy’ Melissa told Angel she saw a man with a towel around his neck and Angel was like so what? So Melissa tells Hattie she saw a hot guy with a towel around his waist and he dropped it. Then Melissa told me she walked into the men’s room by mistake and saw a really hot, sexy guy taking a shower. Now you see how hard it is to pin down Melissa with the truth. And I still haven’t gotten to the part about her washing her underwear in the sink.

It was starting to get cold and the temperatures dropped below freezing most nights. Melissa said she was staying at a camp site on the edge of town (funny, but there is no camp site on the edge of town) and she had a season pass but in the off season she still had to pay to camp. She started sleeping in the parking lot at work (short commute there) But it was cold. So that’s when she started sleeping upstairs.

This is hands down the dumbest thing I have ever seen. The office workers left at 5 and Melissa’s shift ended at six. So she clocked out and went upstairs and slept on the floor of a cubical. The next morning she got up at 5:30, washed off in the bathroom, got dressed, nuked a TV dinner for breakfast and then clocked in. What got her in trouble was acting like she really was at home.

She got an air mattress so she wouldn’t have to sleep on that hard floor. Then she decided to sleep in since the office workers didn’t show until 8. So she’d wake up at 5:45, go clock in, reset the alarm, and go back to sleep. She was still doing nothing all day. She still sat in the break room reading and eating for hours. Then Melissa started leaving without clocking out. She go to the gym or the store or the mall or wherever. This went on for months and months.
Everybody knew about it but overlooked her because nobody wanted to be the asshole who fired a homeless person.

It all came to a head one day when Melissa got locked out of her bedroom. Keith came upstairs to use the computer. He tried the door but it was locked. He started to leave and Melissa opened the door. I think she was a little afraid because no one had ever walked in on her sleeping before. Actually, he hadn’t caught her, he just tried a locked door and if Melissa had kept her cool she could have gotten up and gotten the mattress out of sight. But she let Keith in and then she went downstairs. When Keith left he pulled the door to, locking it. Melissa couldn’t get back in until the office people showed up and they didn’t know what to make of the mattress and clanging alarm clock.

She still could have gotten away with it, but she came back up there to get her stuff and she ranted and raved the whole time about Keith locking her out on purpose. So somebody complained. That was the first blow.

The next blow was she ate something that disagreed with her and she didn’t make it to the bathroom on time so Melissa took off her panties and washed them out in the sink. Then she hung them over the stall to dry. The two most anal-retentive-must-play-by-the-rules-goody-two-shoes people at work came in, saw the giant tent-like panties covering the stall and raised hell.

Depressed by these turns of events, Melissa headed to the break room for some comfort food. The lab manager asked her to test some vials and she said she would ‘when she got off break.’ An hour later she was still on break so the manager asked her about it again. Melissa went off on the man. Strike three.

Finally all of these reached the ears of our boss. He might have been able to overlook each event if they had all occurred on different days. But now people were pressuring him to do something.

He got Melissa out of the break room and told her she had to do some work. Last chance. He came back to check on her and she was back on break, stuffing her face and reading. So he gave her the boot. Nobody accused him of being an asshole.