And still more

Apparently someone was loitering outside the building on Saturday (I'm glad I've decided not to come up on weekends....) My chair ran into him, called the police. The man apparently thought he had a warrant against him (I'm surprised he copped to that) but there was nothing the police turned up, so they told him to leave.

Turns out there's an outdoor plug there - the guy was charging his phone and using our free wifi.

And yeah, I get that charging a phone takes almost NO electricity, but still - we can't be the free electric outlet for the entire town; we are already under severe budget cuts as it is.

Also, it's CREEPY to have unknown people loitering around. I don't care if that makes me a misanthrope, it's creepy. I don't want to be up here alone and have J. Random Dude hanging around when I come out. I've been catcalled a few times in my life, I had an incident in a train station once where a guy tried to chat me up and was becoming progressively more pushy, and I was about to abandon my luggage and run when another man came in and the guy immediately shut up and left. I once had to move to the lounge car on the train (and explain to the conductor why) when some guy kept trying to give me his address (he had a strange hair fetish; he told me he wanted me to mail him my ponytail if I ever cut it off). I've been panhandled aggressively in more cities than I care to remember. So I have a lot of bad stranger-experiences.

Those cameras can't get here fast enough, and I hope they put one trained on the front door.

We are also working to either turn off that outlet, or put a lock-box on it. Frankly, I think our wifi hotspot should also be turned off on the weekends, but what do I know?

At least this morning the lot wasn't trashed. But I don't want this to escalate to someone getting mugged or worse.

For the nonce, when I'm up here in the early mornings alone, I made a sign for my door saying, "Please knock. I am in but for security concerns I am keeping my door closed when I think I am in the building alone." And yeah, someone really bent on hurting me would knock and I wouldn't know (maybe we need peepholes in our doors), but at least it keeps anyone roaming away.

This town is way too darn small and has too crummy shopping and too few museums for me to put up with this level of creepiness and crime on campus.

Conversion to hermit: 85% complete. Now I just need to find some way of getting groceries without going to the store, and get myself used to the idea of teaching online.


Edited to add: this is a little extreme (I don't want to stab everyone on Earth; it's more like I want to run home, lock the door, and only open it for the UPS guy bringing me yarn) but this kind of sums up the past two Monday mornings:

Edited to add, again: here's one that's maybe a little more realistic for me.

Added note: why are pictures of Fluttershy crying, especially when linked with "grown up" feelings or responses, so disturbing? I once re-captioned a Fluttercry picture with the old Prof. Farnsworth, "I don't want to live on this planet any more" and wow, that was uncomfortable.