Don't listen to them voices - they'll only git you in trouble. LetsNotMeet

Almost ten years ago I worked for a bank, one of the big ones, at a branch near my hometown. We served a lot of oddballs there. Most of them just said or did inappropriate things. There was the lady, for instance, who liked to hit on me and swore she had written multiple hit pop songs, but Nick Lachey's manager stole them and gave some of them to 98 Degrees, and sold others to the Backstreet Boys and NSync.

Several more were creepy, but I'd stop short of calling them dangerous. There was a guy who would ask where - specifically - I was if he came to the branch while I was on my lunch break, and who would try to pry details about my personal life out of my coworkers and me.

We had so many weirdos, the first week I was at the branch I asked the assistant manager if there was some sort of group home nearby. (There wasn't.) Most of them were harmless.

There were a few though, who were actually scary. And one towers above the rest.

The first time I saw her she was lumbering across the parking lot, looking a hell of a lot like Anne Ramsey, the lady who played Ma Fratelli in The Goonies. "Her name is Liza Pitts!" My supervisor hurriedly whispered. "That's her, don't ask for her ID. And don't call her Terry, that's her husband."

I ran Liza's transaction while she muttered to ... someone. I can to understand that this was a good day waiting on Liza. She constantly talked to someone only she was aware of, apparently standing just behind her shoulder. She'd get mad at him or her too. "Don't tell me that! I know that! It ain't my fault they done that."

Liza was not good with names. Me, she always called us names that were close to our first names, but a little off. Liza also did not like her upstairs neighbors. They snuck into her apartment, she said, to steal condiments from the refrigerator. "I knowed it was them! I don't need no proof!" she declared to the invisible, unheard entity over her shoulder, who apparently begged to differ.

A good day of waiting on Liza involved nothing more than this; a lot of muttering and an earful about her ketchup-thieving neighbors. As the months went by though it was clear she was getting worse. For one, the muttering became firm and audible. We were no longer the only ones who could hear the constant stream of talk about how "God'll git you if you don't watch out, and he'll git them too." Our other customers could hear her now, and they were clearly freaked out.

Liza's neighbors came under fire for allegedly using fiber-optic cameras, run through her ceiling fans, to spy on her and steal her financial information. This was the start of our second phase with her, in which surveillance was a constant concern. The neighbors were stealing her information, and by the way, we needed to maybe draw the blinds because if someone was standing in the distant trees with a telescope or a camera with a zoom lens, they could look through that window and steal everyone's passwords and information.

This went on for a year or maybe too. Throughout it all, the slackers who were my fellow tellers would make themselves scarce whenever she saw her car. It was hilarious, to them, to keep making me wait on Liza. "Well, you do handle her really well," the assistant manager offered one day while everyone giggled. I got pissed. "You mark this down," I said. "It's funny now, but it's not going to funny at all when she comes in here and starts accusing us of things."

My unerring ability to tell the future stems not from any supernatural ability, but rather from a great deal of experience observing people who are stupid and/or nuts. A few weeks later, Liza returned to the branch, madder than hell.

"You tell them to git that truck away from my apartment! I seen that truck! You tell them I ain't stupid."

No, she wasn't stupid. Crazy, on the other hand ... Liza had come to believe the bank was spying on her, using a surveillance van parked across from the street from her home.

Whoever actually owned the offending vehicle, it wasn't going anywhere. Liza reminded us about the van every time she came to the branch, which was much more frequently than in the past. Her threats were always vague. I got the sense that she had learned how to veil them so that it would be hard to accuse her of explicitly threatening to hurt a specific person. It sure worked with my managers, who bizarrely felt that the situation hadn't escalated to the point where we needed to close her accounts.

The incident that finally tore it was completely unrelated. Another client threatened one of my coworkers, screaming in her face and backing her up against a wall. Our manager demanded his account be closed, and, I guess finally understanding what it was like to wait on her, threw Liza's in too.

I had been told, but did not believe, that Terry was actually less pleasant than his wife. I was wrong. He came to the branch with her to pick up a cashier's check for the money in their accounts. He wasn't crazy, but he sure as hell was abusive. Liza came in one more time after that, trying to cash a check, IIRC. The whole time, she kept telling the person by her shoulder, "Ain't no shame on me. I didn't do nothing wrong. Ain't no shame on me. I wasn't the one did it."

She offered a word of advice before she left. "Don't listen to them voices. They'll only git you in trouble."

I don't know what they were telling her that day, but I'm glad she wasn't heeding them.

Submitted October 16, 2015 at 10:23PM by RobertsRulesOfHorror http://ift.tt/1RMKmSh LetsNotMeet