Years back, I had been between relationships and just decided that perhaps I needed time to myself, basically dating no one. I was in the middle of undergraduate work for genetics at the time, planning to eventually move onto medical school when a long-term relationship just fell apart on me. Realizing I had a number of years of tough education ahead of me, I realized this was probably not the time to get involved in any kind of future relationship.
Life doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately.
During that summer, I took a part time temp job to just pass the time (and keep up my finances before school work made that impossible), so I got this really mundane job working for a subsidiary of Pacific Bell. They were moving one section of the business to another location, so the job consisted of a bunch of temp workers literally transferring physical files from one place to another. Very boring work.
But kind of exactly what I needed after a break-up.
There were a few dozen other workers there with me, and there were a couple of supervisors. I kept being offered one of the mid-level supervisory positions, due to education, but as I wasn’t really there for longevity or intentions of rising up, I chose to remain at the bottom and just do the grunt work. Again, it was exactly what I needed.
The job was supposed to last about three months, and about a few weeks into it, the cliques already started to form, and as you would suspect, it’s very easy to get cast into certain corners, even without doing anything to make it happen.
One of the first things I noticed was that because of the horrible management of this project, we had lots and lots of time of sitting around in conference rooms just talking. I quickly started bringing books to read to pass the time, but all around me, people did the sort of things you might expect happen when people have lots of time and nothing to do. Add in those cliques I talked about, and you might get the impression that things might turn sour really quick-like.
The place had a real feral activity to it that resonated with herd mentality. The group would often find a weaker member of the room and then pounce on him or her, pretty much turning that person’s life into a nightmare until the person finally decided to never return again. We lost a number of people that way.
In the early days of this group activity, I found myself targeted early but that ended quickly as I was also a debater (and had been doing it in college to begin with); they discovered it was no fun engaging someone who could rapidly respond to anything they wanted to bring my way. So, I was mainly left to my own devices, which, as I said, usually consisted of me and my book.
For the most part, I really didn’t pay much attention to what happened around me, until I noticed the attention turn to a young woman named Sally. Now, Sally was originally from Hong Kong, on a path towards citizenship in the US, but she spoke horrible English. This made her an easy target of a group of workers who just loved the idea that it took her time to respond to everything they said, so it was easy to twist her words around and add to her frustration. Plus, she was the kind of young woman who got really upset, really fast and when edged on by people who are just trying to cause trouble, it does not bode well.
Due to a few assignments that were doled out by coincidence, Sally and I spent a few hours alone in the room when others were doing other things, so I actually had a chance to talk to her. Unlike the rest of them, I’m a really good listener, so when she was struggling to say what she wanted to say, due to broken English, I spent more time just listening and letting her find the words that she wanted to say instead. I learned quite a bit about her and found some of her background to be quite fascinating. Example: She was very well educated; just not in English.
As you might suspect, the others treated her like she was stupid, as people tend to do when someone around them is not fluent in the mainstream language. And as they continued on their warpath each time they tried to spook her, I started interjecting in those conversations so that not only did they have to attack her, but now they had to go after me as well. And as I said before, I’m not the sort of person you want to engage in argumentation.
Quickly, she realized it was a lot safer to hang out wherever I was and was pretty much always sitting next to me. The others just quickly realized that she wasn’t worth the effort, as they weren’t getting the results they wanted, so they went after someone else and continued their usual bantering. To be honest, I don’t remember much more about them after that.
So, needless to say, it was very difficult for me to separate myself from Sally during this work assignment. At the same time, I didn’t want to lead her on or get involved with any relationships at this time, so even though she was always around me, I tried to avoid thinking much about it. However, as it was getting close for me to finish my time there (school was going to be starting back up soon), I was going to take the coward way out and just disappear once my assignment was complete.
Unfortunately, Sally was a lot smarter than I realized. The day before I was supposed to be done (I had told no one but my immediate supervisor I was leaving), she appeared where I was sorting files and held out her hand: “Phone number!” she said.
I guess I should have realized there was a problem when we first started dating because it started with me getting home that night, receiving a message on my answering machine stating when and where we were meeting for coffee at a time she designated.
So, a couple of little things that help explain her a little further: First, she was a dead ringer for the actress Michelle Yeoh, something I made the mistake of saying one early date. She got extremely angry and said “She’s ugly!” Which, of course, she she’s not.
She also hated every one of my friends. Every one. The men were all abusers. Her words. The women? I suspect a bit of jealousy, even though they were never a threat to her in any way.
On a whim, she would just get really angry over anything. When we disagreed on something, she would pinch, really hard. And she would rarely stop. I know it sounds kind of funny because pinches don’t sound really painful, but oh wow, they were. I’ve been shot before, and I’m really not sure which one I’d consider worse.
One of my favorite, yet weird, experiences involves when we went to see a movie. The usher was taking our tickets and he looked up and her and nearly dropped his jaw, stating: “Oh, my god, you look just like the woman in the James Bond film.”
He was referring to, of course, Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies. The second he said it, I saw her face turn seriously angry, and I said: “I’ll go grab us some seats.” The last look I saw on his face was what appeared to be mortal fear as Sally was closing in on her next victim. About five minutes later, she sat down next to me, and I said, “He’s still alive, right?” She just nodded and then started in on some popcorn.
I’ll be honest, but I just wasn’t really ready for a relationship at the time. I kind of fell into it, and I really wasn’t over the previous one. And she kept getting more and more angry and violent as time moved on. I brought her to a school function once as my plus one, and my thesis advisor pulled me aside before asking me if she needed to plan an intervention to get me out of this relationship.
So, at some point I realized it was probably safer to end this relationship, so I tried to sit down with her and talk about it, but every time I did, she suddenly forgot how to speak any English, said she had to leave, and then came back a few days later as if nothing had happened. This stretched on for some time.
Finally, I set up a time where we could talk, and I said, without doubt, that this is something that needs to happen. Instead of pulling the same tactic, she nodded and left.
A few days later, she wrote me an email, and started with an abusive flurry of messages about how I was the worst person who ever walked the planet. I, at first, tried to respond in as friendly a manner as possible, but then those messages kept getting worse and worse. So, I stopped responding.
And then she started sending me bills. For her time. She had literally gone through and calculated everything she might have ever spent during our six months together and wanted compensation. So, clothes she bought, transportation she had taken, air she breathed, etc., was fair game. And when I didn’t respond, those amounts kept going up, like the worst loan shark in history.
Finally, I moved away and entered grad school. I stopped hearing from her.
Years later, a friend of mine from where I had been living sent me a link to a Craigslist ad. It was a series of pictures of Sally, with three kids (too young to have any connection to me), trying to find a new boyfriend because the last guy left her with three kids.
I don’t really have much to say. Maybe it’s just better that way.