Spazzmanda

I have come to the conclusion that I attract bizarre behavior from some of society’s more unsavory members.

A while ago, maybe about a year or so, I was the recipient of  some lovely prison art, rendered in colored pencil on a scrap of prison sheet in my likeness. It was the result of my writing an article for a local paper that had a teensy, tiny photo of me with it.  As I was blogless at the time, I let my friend Olaf cover it for posterity. It sure was amusing to other folks- you can read all about it here.

So this brings me to yesterday. I noticed that I had five missed text messages and hadn’t remembered missing any calls the night before. I didn’t recognize what seemed to be an Atlanta number, and I was shocked to see that some creep had sent me some photographs of their, er, um, man parts. There was also a photo of their face (thanks so much.) My new admirer is a black man in his mid-thirties that prefers to travel on what looks like a Marta train, at night. I didn’t look at all of the photos, but Fox- who doesn’t scare easily- as her philosophy is that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all- said it was pretty much all photographs of the same.

As I have never encountered this sort of situation before, I called my cell phone provider. They were very apologetic and they credited me some text messages and offered to change my number. I didn’t feel that such a drastic measure was necessary… yet.  They suggested that I file a police report. So I called the non-emergency police number, and they sent a pre-pubescent police officer out here to handle me (let’s just call him Opie because we can and he was russet-headed.) Apparently, unless you have full intention of prosecuting the offender, they won’t file a report. Since I was unsure of what all of that would entail, I opted to not do anything at this time. Yes the photos were gross, but they weren’t threatening, and it is likely that the phone was lost or stolen and found its way into perv hands. But get this, Opie suggested that I SAVE the messages for a while for evidentiary purposes in the event I get more that are actually threatening. Which I haven’t. But, EW. I feel like my phone is contaminated. I know that there is nothing physically different about my phone, but just knowing that the images are IN THERE is enough to make me feel all oookie.

Oh, and I did do something I shouldn’t have. I responded to the first photo with a text that said “I wouldn’t be too proud of that little thing” or something to that effect. Yeah, I knew it was a bad idea when I did it -as the cop told me- but I had only seen the first photo and figured it was a random prank and I wasn’t going to let some creep freak me out, I thought that “unimpressed” was a better platform. Oh well.

Have a Happy Friday the 13th!