Stalkers alert!

I was reminded recently of my stalker incident. I had managed to blot this from my memory for a good few years, but I suppose as I still have the evidence it ain't quite gone. It wasn't all that threatening really, indeed I have had a few drinks out of the story, but it's time to out it.

I was stalked by a librarian.

It was my very first library job, back when I was young, enthusiastic, and, as it turned out, extremely naive. Just moved to the big smoke from the World's Tiniest Village (tm), boyfriend who was miles away, and I landed a job in a great little library with lovely friendly librarians who took me under their wing. I spend most lunchtimes in the pub and most afternoons on the floor. We had so much fun, the students even used to come and show us rude pictures they had found in the medical textbooks. Then one colleague who shall remain nameless, who I got on with brilliantly (maybe too well as it turned out), started being weird about my weekend visits from the boyfriend. Then stalker boy bought a flat and needed to rent out his spare room. We thought it was ideal, he wanted less rent than I paid for a bedsit slightly bigger than my belongings, and we could continue the work fun into the wee hours! Marvellous. Until he announced that boyfriend couldn't stay over. Alarm bells started ringing then, and I started to distance myself from him. But what with it being such a small library and all it wasn't hard to see he was going nuts.

Then came the letter. In my in-tray one afternoon. Seriously, it was 8 pages of tiny writing on A4 paper. 8 pages!! A4 paper!! Turns out I was leading him on, and he felt obliged to follow me round at the weekends to see the evidence that I was cheating on him. Oh-righty. And to top it all off I had apparently been flirting with all my other male colleagues too, and the students. Hell, any man who came near me. And he was going to write to my boyfriend and tell him. I actually felt sorry for him and tried to talk to him about it (I was 21, he was 34 btw). Didn't help, I had to transfer to another library in the end. I thought I saw him the other day on the street and it was really weird. I ducked into a shop just in case! He was a freak.

I've still got the letter. Just in case he does it again and actually kills the poor girl he fixates on. But then I doubt he would. Stalker librarians are tortured souls, driven by imagined slights and random events which are given bizarre significance. When they finally lose it, they just write it all down (or on their blogs, ahem...). Most people didn't even realise they were crazy stalkers. Then they retreat to their offices and sulk.