From Marjorie Asturias’ blog, we have character development for anyone looking to craft a really, really, really fucking creepy guy? You know, the one who is obsessed with the heroine and really has no sense of personal boundaries or what constitutes outstandingly squicky behavior? Have him leave cards inside romance novels in the library looking for dates with romance-reading women. And for that extra-special side order of “WTF?” have the cards read a little something like this (hit it):
ATTENTION LADIES
Intelligent, funny, male, 37, seeks affectionate, non-smoking lady,
age unimportant, thin to curvy build, pregnant OK, submissive preferred,
no drugs. XXX-XXXX or emailaddress@yahoo.com
ew ew EEWWWW!!!
If I found that in one of my library books I don’t think I could read it. I would have to return it and get the tainted story out of my apartment.
Well.
One never can say that she has seen everything, can one?
Holy WTF!
Is that a “desperate and sad” card I see being played there?
I prefer the use of a big red L on the forehead myself.
One wonders what he’sbeen reading.
One wonders what he’s been smoking.
Pregnant OK?!!! WTF on toast!!
That has to be the creepiest of the creepy in creepyville…I’m not saying that pregnant women aren’t entitled to a little somethin’ somethin’, but ladies, NOT THIS GUY!!
Now, see, why do they have to befoul library books? Have they no shame?
rather75? No, I’d rather not!
Dear God, that’s a whole lot of wrong.
Whoa. “Pregnant OK” and “submissive preferred”? That right there is what you call A GIANT, BLINKING, NEON DANGER SIGN.
Back away slowly, do not engage, and when you’ve achieved a decent headstart, RUN.
Oh hey, love the little bar at the top!
Honestly? I would take that right down to the local police station and suggest maybe a nice female cop give him a call.
YUCK
Don’t you feel bad for the book in which that card appeared? I mean, the author works so hard, and makes it over all the big hurdles in the pub process: the writing, the editing, the publication, the cover art, the promotional effort, it’s bought for a library collection! Hooray! And then…
…some weirdo tarnishes the reader’s experience by creepifying the book as a pick-up tool.
Ew ew ew ew ew.
Yes, I finally had time to install two long-overdue features: coding buttons to make your codifying and bolding and italicizing and whatnot much easier, AND the ability to edit your comments. Should appear under your name once you’ve posted as a little [edit?] link.
Enjoy. My apologies for taking so long.
Okay, absolutely true creepy library story coming up. This happened years ago, in the early 1990s. I was upstairs in the stacks looking for some sort of science reference.
It must have been a Saturday. I was completely hagged out; as in old pink sweats, not-great hair. And I was cruising along, not noticing that there was a guy cruising the other side at the same time. They were double sided bookshelves, you know, where you could see clear through. I kneel down and remove a couple of books and here’s this guy, RIGHT on the other side, jacking off. In a public library. With kids around. At ME!!
It took my brain a minute to actually process what was happening. I said, “Oh NO you don’t, you put that thing away RIGHT NOW.” dropped the books and started charging up the aisle, right at him. I don’t know what I was thinking except I was SO FREAKING PISSED. He jumped up and took off at a dead run, so we witness the guy with the polyester pants, fly flapping, being chased by the woman in the pink sweats, who is yelling somewhat incoherently “stop that guy! Stop him!” And before everybody got out of their collective shock he was out the door and gone.
As far as I know he was never caught. I filled out a report at the library and a police report (taken by a young rookie who kept snickering, I swear I wanted to brain him too).
Put me off libraries for awhile, that did.
Robinjn-
You just beat my two personal creep stories.
One is same scenario as above, but at a gas station. I have a truck, so when I climbed on to the running board to get in after filling up, I noticed the guy across from me…in his car *ahem* doing his thing…while staring at me.
The other was my stalker who joined a women’s lit class that I was taking. He followed me around, sat next to me whenever he could, asked to be in my project group… all those creepy things. Creepiest of all was he disappeared after I got engaged.
common36- I’m sure at least 36 of us have similar stories in common 😉 Why, oh why, must some people be so strange.
I once got on the subway and – miracle! – found a seat to myself. The train wasn’t crowded. There was a certified Crazy Lady in disheveled garb and a collection of bags at the end of the train, and she was singing at the top of her lungs about how we were going to hell unless we rode with her to the train to glory.
Then she starts screaming, and I mean SCREAMING, at the man sitting next to me. He’s wearing really, really baggy pants, and she’s hollering at him that he ought not whack off and certainly not at a nice girl like me. (This is about the point I tuned into what she was saying instead of registering merely that it was very loud).
“YOU PUT THAT AWAY!THAT’S A NICE GIRL AND YOU PUT THAT AWAY RIGHT NOW! YOUR MOMMA IS ASHAMED OF YOU NOW PUT THAT AWAY!”
Mistake: he didn’t put it away.
She grabs a bag (she had about 8 grocery sacks full of stuff) and starts whapping him with it, and he can’t defend himself because he is too busy holding the top of his pants closed and yet his wee wanking wangstick is still poking out, so he’s trying to deflect the bag assault and make sure that she doesn’t hit his crotch toy while holding closed his pants – clearly he’d been at it for awhile because his pants were way open and way down – and he just didn’t have enough arms.
And she’s screaming about how he’s really REALLY going to hell and she’ll make sure he gets there RIGHT NOW. She starts praying to the Lord for strength against the sinner while she keeps whapping him with a grocery bag that I think was full of other grocery bags, and he’s ducking and holding his pants closed and trying to cross his legs and turning deeply red from embarrassment.
Then we got to the next stop and he jumped up, hiked up his pants and ran off the car into the station. The lady grabbed her bag and all the others at her feet and hurried after him, but she clearly was not going to move fast enough to catch him.
Then the doors shut to complete and total silence. There was a couple at the end of the car. They stared at me. I stared at them. Total silence.
I had some kind of delayed reaction, I think, because I didn’t start laughing until I got off the train at my stop and started walking to the PATH station to go home to Jersey. Then I realized the hilarity – and the scary – and nearly bent in half laughing.
Well it was only a lot, lot later I was able to see the funny in this one though it still pisses me off. A library. With kids around. Grrr.
But I bet that guy didn’t expect me to get all whomp ass on him. I still remember him running through the library, pants flapping, eyes big as saucers, everybody else standing there gaping like fish.
Kismet, your second story doesn’t sound *so* bad, just kinda sad. Woulda been creepier if he didn’t disappear when you got engaged.
Bwhahahahahaha!!
Is it really awful if I say I hope they were tourists and therefore likely to tell this story a million times over? Because really, it needs airtime.
My biggest creep story: I once took Greyhound from Ft. Jackson to CA. About 18 hours into the trip, I fell asleep, curled up in the seat and facing the window, with the seat next to me empty. Some time later, I woke up, pretty sure something had touched my ass. I didn’t move, since it was the middle of the night and whoever was now sitting in the other seat could have been asleep. But then he groped me, going for a boob this time. I elbowed him. Hard. Caught him in either the sternum or the throat because he coughed and choked a little. Hey, I was fresh from the Army’s hand to hand combat class.
Ewww creepy.
My only library horror story is rather the after effects. I was in the back section by the sci-fi/fantasy area which they liked to not have well lit. There was usually me and some older dude back there making our happy piles of picks. We never bothered each other or we just ducked out of the way. Occaisionally he would reach a book I was jumping up to get.
One Saturday I’m browsing and I do my quick book check. I pop it open to a random page and read. Well this book falls open but several pages were stuck together. Apparently someone had gotten VERY excited all over this book. And it was A LOT the book was coated inside.
I recall giving a little horrified scream and dropping the book and sort of backing away. The older guy came over to see what was wrong, picked up the book, gave a gasp and a little scream himself, dropped the book and ran to the librarian.
SHE came in and also made a shriek-y noise and we all sort of stared at it. None of us wanting to touch the tainted book. I was the first to scatter. I just sort of grabbed my books and mumbled about “Gotta go mom” and ran out. I was VERY leary of checking out books after that.
Yuck. We all know library books aren’t terribly sanitary-who washes their hands before they touch the book? But to think, or in Flo’s case, to know, that the book has been coated in man-juice is just gross and creepy and makes me want to wear gloves when I read library books.
I was hit on by this guy at the grocery when I was 8mos. pregnant. I was just scandalized because at the time I ws quite unaware of that particular fetish.
I told him I had a gun in my purse. He walked away very fast.
I work in a library with an active Preservation department. Every few years the head of preservation runs an informational workshop on how to handle books that have been ‘compromised’ by any sort of contaminant. The rule around here is if you think the book has biological stains (apparently there are a lot of irate censors who feel that fecal matter is an appropriate thing to smear on pages that upset them) leave it where it is, get someone from preservation who will put on gloves to come and get the book. Since there is the possibility of disease, you have to leave them to the experts..
Eew. Just …Yuck. No way would I be able to read the book after finding that.
There ought to be a law.
I was once mooned by a teenaged boy at my local library. I still can’t figure out if it was a prank, accidental indecent exposure, or something more disturbing. He saw me and another woman approaching the entrance, and when he hurried to get in front of us (which was odd), I noticed that half his naked ass was hanging out. Saggy pants are one thing, but ever heard of underwear, dude?
Grr-ody.
My creepy story was not at a library, but a movie store I worked in at the time. I was 15 and the store had one of those porno movie sections that had the swinging saloon doors and books with pictures from the movie box cover. Well, this guy came in one night and, of course, headed straight to the sex saloon and started flipping through the books. Before I know it, he had his hand in his pants, pumping away, and staring directly at me! I was horrified! I jumped to the phone behind the counter and called the cops. He ran out, but actually came back in the door and asked what time we closed…not kidding! Anyway, the cops came by, I about died explaining to the cop what the guy was doing, and they actually caught him at the 7-11 doing the same things to the magazines!!
Bunch of sickos out there!
I was a librarian for ten years, and though I never had to actively deal with the wankers (as we blithely called them), I was witness to a few amusing incidents.
One happened to a friend of mine, who worked in the library for at least fifteen years before I came along. She told me that one day she was walking along with an armload of books and other stuff when she passed a mostly-empty shelf with something lying on it. She paused, looked closer…someone’s penis. She quickly ascertained that he was standing on the other side of the shelf and had just whipped it out and laid it there for the lulz. She also ascertained that nobody else was around—so she dropped her armload of stuff right on it. She said he squealed like a pig and limped out as fast as he could.
The other incident was a glorious day in which I saw a large red-bearded Viking of a man fleeing for his life while pursued by our five-foot-nothing business reference librarian wielding a giant dictionary. She’d caught him wanking off in her section and declared war. We baked her a cake with a sheriff’s star on it—and when the guy tried to sneak back in a week later, we all recognized him and got him arrested.
Ah, good times. I can tell I’ve been out of the library too long, I even miss the crazies.
There was a sicko who used the computers at several different libraries to read absolutely digusting porn (golden showers, lactating women, barely-legal looking girls, you name it). They caught him with his hand down his pants, and he was already on the shit list for putting naked pictures of himself on the computer and setting them as the desktop image. And, um, guns cocked and loaded, if you know what I mean.
I saw one, and almost lost my lunch. Almost nothing compares to looking up at a computer screen and seeing some strange wang looking back at me.
…I just want to know what book it was.
I just finished reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (two thumbs up), and I had read this post before I read the book, but now, after reading the book, I wonder if McCreepy hadn’t read the book as well.
One of the chapters tells how arousal affects our sense of taboo. When levels of arousal increase, what a subject normally considers taboo will change by a good bit (i.e. what is previously considered “ew” becomes less “ew” and more “hmmm” to the same person). The book did the experiment with men, not women, but I wonder if the guy was thinking, “okay, so where do I find aroused women to test the theory?”
It truly is a fascinating book on behavioral economics. Much like freakonomics, for those that enjoyed that one.
I work in the corporate headquarters for a major chain bookstore (er…not the one that’s currently experiencing financial difficulty, if that gives you a clue), and all this talk about “tainted” library books has reminded me that our company tracks things by subject, big-time…and the two subjects most commonly shoplifted are religious books and erotica.
Make of that what you will.
I make it a rule not to post from work, and of course by the time I’d gotten home, you’d segued into libraries, but I thought I’d still share.
Just yesterday I was trolling the local news sites. Seems a pervy loser decided to drop his drawers in front of a couple of teens. One of the teens whipped out a cellphone and took his picture. Said picture has been shown on news networks across the Rocky Mountain region. I’m sure his parents must be so proud.
Diane
hmn… spamblocker is action14. Not sure if she was 14, but she definitely took action
A woman did that on the subway in New York a few years back. She made it look like she was texting but really she took the perv’s picture, then walked herself to the police to give it to them.
It was in every paper, and so many other women came forward to say he’d jacked off at them, too. Usually on the same train.
Then he was identified, and wow, did the Post and the Daily News have a field day with that one.
I’m not clever enough to find the new edit button (fried brain cells from too much disaster planning), and forgot to add a link. Here it is…
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/15643128/detail.html
Diane again
When I was 6 months pregnant with my last child, I was still waiting tables in the NCO Club at Spangdahlem AB in Germany. Now you get hit on a lot when you work as a bartender/bar waitress in a military club and my method of dealing with it was always to make some snappy comeback because most guys will back down gracefully (whether they’re happy about it or not) if you make their buddies laugh. However, this night, I was tired, cranky, and my lower back was throbbing in time to the music and I just looked at the guy who had slid his hand down my back while asking what I was doing later and said, “You’ve got to be f*cking kidding me! I am 6 months pregnant, for gawds sake! My feet hurt! My back hurts! Touch me again and I’ll make you hurt! Are we clear?” He backed up a couple of steps and said, “You’re pregnant? I thought you’d just gained some weight.”
Whatever look I gave him, it must have been a good one. He finished his beer while I was standing there, handed me a $5 tip, and left.
I used to work at a costume shop, and there were a few creepies there. Most of them were call in—the same guy would call about once a month and tell us his mommy was angry at him and he had to wear little girls clothes for a month. Did we have any that would fit an adult male? another guy would call pretty often to ask us if the catwoman costume would fit a large man. You get all kinds, so we tried to be professional at first, but they always wanted to talk for a while (“It’ll be pretty embarrassing, huh? Are you disgusted?”)
Another time a couple comes in, giggling the entire time, and rents our fuzzy bear costume. Then we never saw it again, and they wouldn’t tell us what had happened to it or what they had been using it for.
The best, though, was the guy who came out of the dressing room naked when my friend was alone in the shop. He waggled at her and said, “What do you think?”
“I think it’s small.”
I worked the phones at a hospital at night. Every now and then, we’d get a series of weird/creepy calls from the same phone # (hospitals have caller i.d., genuis). I wouldn’t put up with their shit and told them I had called the police. Some of my coworkers were too scared and didn’t do anything but hang up. I usually don’t care how people get their jollies but freaking other people out and making them scared for their safety is a definite no-no (of course, so is pedophilia, rape, etc. All that stuff is implied no-nos.)
I’ve been thinking, what if this guy didn’t put himself out there this way? What if he has a really vindictive ex? There have been publicized instances of women being victimized this way by men posting their info on sex sites, complete with phony ads—maybe that’s what happened with this guy.
Or maybe he’s just a really pervy asshat
Ooh, Tina, I like the way you think. I’ll remember this one for future reference.
What’s that? That a vindictive ex might be doing this to him?
At my local library we had (they must have caught the perv) a problem with “bookmarks” in some of the sci-fi/fantasy books.
Whoever the jerk was, I’m guessing a “he,” would put cut out photos of his naked girlfriends in the books as book marks and not take them out afterwards.
Well, that was squicky, but stupid. I mean he checked out the books. It was just a matter of time before he’d be caught by a shrewd librarian cross-referencing tainted titles with patron activity.
It hasn’t happened in over a year now. I wish I knew which librarian caught him because they deserve a raise.
And it’s stories like this that got me through my MLS program and then into a job that had nothing to do with public libraries.
I mean, I love the theory of library science—particularly archiving and cataloging science—but sweet Jesus. The people ruin the whole thing.