Awkward Acquaintances and TMI

Normally I don't take advice from comedians, but Dane Cook might have a point. I have recently found myself in a situation where a Snickers bar could be the eventual difference between my life and death. I'll explain.

We have an office weirdo. Every office does, but the magnitude of this man's awkwardness is intensified by the fact that we live, work, and exist in a relatively small, conservative Texas city. This level of weirdness is usually only found in insanely large cities where they can be a member of an entire weird community, with their own weird clubs and hangout spots, where Bomber jackets and horribly awkward comments are expected and, in fact, common. But no, this guy lives here. Works here. And worst of all, he has taken a liking to me.

There is a point where awkwardness turns into straight creepy, and this man could tell you exactly where that point is, and how to sprint straight past GO! and collect your two hundred dollars. I think it started the day I noticed he moved in next door. I had already seen him at work and wondered what was going on in the heads of our senior management to have hired this guy, and then one night I’m out with my best friend and pulling into my driveway I see some dude hauling boxes up the stairs to his apartment, right across the way from me. I think he looks slightly familiar, but think nothing of it. Then I double-take and am sure he looks familiar, and he's looking at me. Then I triple-take, realize its weird co-worker, and instead of saying "welcome to the neighborhood" or "hello again," I spew, "what are you doing here?!" That marked the beginning of a series of the creepiest exchanges I can remember to date, including the famous, "put the lotion in the basket!"

That brief encounter at my apartment complex apparently gave him hope. Maybe he mistook my stare of horrified disbelief for something more akin to a starry-eyed gaze. Maybe he mistook the close proximity of our cubicles at the office for fate, forgetting the fact that he moved floors and evicted a fellow employee to sit caddy corner to me. Whatever the case, my daily routine at work now includes fielding questions about my apartment, our landlords, and my daily workout routine (as he apparently saw me leaving at 5:45am one morning and coming home sweaty 90 minutes later). Conversations, mind you, that are completely out of context for what is going on at the time. His mouth seems to work as most brilliant authors would describe their "stream of consciousness" writing - there are no checks and balances and no system of editing. The problem, of course, is that authors engage in this activity privately, in a journal or diary - when practiced verbally, stream of consciousness is far less brilliant and more like the drunk, senile grandparent at family gatherings who makes all the children cry.

A few weeks ago, several of us from work were sitting at a local restaurant for lunch together. One of the crew, Ryan, is a hilarious story teller, and was recounting the series of events that led to his opening line of, "so I had to tell my 70 year old neighbor to stop hitting on my wife." Basically, when Ryan decided to relocate here for this job, he and his wife bought their house before they arrived in the city. A couple weeks before they were to move out here, they flew out for a weekend to clean the house and get it ready for the movers to put all their stuff in, only to get there and find that the house had been broken into and the box of cleaning supplies and Wheat Thins they had left on the counter were gone. Ryan was talking about how his super old neighbor had started visiting his wife every day, and she just thought he was sweet until one day the old man brought over a CD he had made filled with old jazz versions of booty-jams. Our entire lunch table was joking about their poor, creepy neighbor and laughing about the prospect of Ryan having to walk over there and tell him to stop hitting on his wife when the comment was made in a fit of group laughter that it was probably creepy old man who broke into the house and stole the cleaning supplies and Wheat Thins, and now has them sitting on his own kitchen counter like a small shrine to his wife. Everybody was busting up when Creep-O opens his mouth and says, "yeah, he probably has like a life-sized mannequin in his basement that he puts makeup on and, like, glued little pieces of hair to it to look like her and everything..."

The table was silent for a solid five seconds... which was followed by the the screeching of chairs sliding back on the tiled floor and the rest of us muttering various versions of, "well, I’ve paid so..." as we got out of our seats to leave.

This is where Dane Cook's advice with the Snicker's bar comes in. Recently, the comments have become even more disturbing, and I’m starting to get to the point where I feel like I need to sit down and engage in conversation with him, perhaps offer him an extra Snickers bar that happened to fall out of the machine this morning, for the sole purpose of being skipped over the day his mind finally cracks and he storms into the office with a sawed-off shotgun. Mannequin-boy has become a joke around the office, but I definitely have a stash of leftover Halloween candy in my desk drawer just in case.