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Worst Sleuth Ever

The Internet is great for stalking. With the combination of social networking sites, instant messaging, message boards…that’s not even getting into all the stuff that makes it great for identity theft as well as stalking. As part of my ongoing mission to spy on my mother’s former coworker, I got her AIM screen name from her Facebook profile and added it so I could have a rough idea of when she was online. I thought it might help to identify whether or not she still worked there. I also have an instant messaging program that lets you open up a tab for a user, whether they’re signed on or not, and then it keeps a running log of when they’re on, off, away, or idle. This has sort of worked: on Monday, she didn’t sign on until after five o’clock; on Tuesday and Wednesday, when she has the day off and has to go to classes, she popped on and off an assload of times throughout the day. Like everything else, it’s circumstantial, but it seems at least reasonable to conclude that she was offline most of Monday because she was working.

So the big goal this morning was to get there around 9:45 and wait and watch, to make absolute positive the car my mom saw on Monday was indeed her former coworker’s car. The only way to make 100% certain was to physically watch her get out of the car and walk into the building. I got a good enough sense of the layout of the business park to know whether or not this was feasible; I had a perfect place to park so I could watch.

Unfortunately, my mom insisted on going with. I told her I know what the girl looks like thanks to Facebook, and I have at least a vague sense of the car she drives — it’s not rocket science. But whatever, it’s her job and her “investigation,” so that’s fine even if it means it’ll be ridiculously easy to catch her in the act.

So we drove into the business park and…a landscaping truck was parked across about five spaces right where the perfect vantage point was. So that sucked, but in retrospect it was probably a good thing; we had to park in a slightly different spot, but it was less noticeable. There was shade on the car; with the other spot, the sun would have been shining right through the windshield, making it obvious two people were sitting there staring. And if one of her coworkers had come by, it would’ve been obvious she was the one in the car.

So we were in the shade, backs to the compound, but my mom was freaking out because cars kept going by and people kept walking around. We were pretty far from any other cars or a desirable parking space, and nobody walking around paid any attention to the two people sitting in the car. In fact, they didn’t even glance in our direction (following one of my many worldly observations, that nobody will give a shit about anything out of the ordinary unless they’re looking for something out of the ordinary — an unfamiliar car with two people sitting in it for no reason? Only a security car would care).

But as 10 o’clock rolled around and the coworker didn’t show up, things got a little disheartening. My mom decided to stick it out until 10:05, but the girl was rarely late (in fact, she was usually early). I was about to suggest continuing the stakeout until 10:30, just to let any mitigating factors (maybe a car accident on the expressway?) work themselves out, but then I remembered something:

Last night, I was yammering on AIM with a couple of people, and my mom’s coworker signed on. After a few moments, she put up a cynical away message that would have endeared her to me if not for the fact that she’s skanky: “As I come home from the South Loop at 9:00, it occurs to me that I’ll have to go back there in less than 12 hours. Suburban life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” A sentiment I thought many times (yeah, she went to my alma mater — needless to say, I had to correct a lot of spelling and grammar to make her away message readable), but usually I shrugged and thought, “Deal with it.”

But then, it occurred to me at 10 a.m. that if, at 9 p.m., she said she’d be back in the South Loop in less than 12 hours…that pretty much meant she wouldn’t be showing up to work. Or, at least, she wouldn’t be anywhere near on time. Finals are gearing up, and I imagine she has a lot of projects due, probably needs to use school resources and can only find the time to do that during time she’s normally working. So she took a day off…

You’d think that’s a pretty big clue that a real, semi-competent investigator would hone in on and say, “Yes, she’ll be down in the city,” and if I had really wanted to I could have used my former college connections to track down where she’d be and when and tail her and/or have her kneecaps broken. But it didn’t occur to me until after we drove all the way out there and sat around for half an hour. And I was going to suggest we wait even longer.

I have no right to continue pretending to be a private detective. I am deleting my Rockford Files ringtone and setting fire to my Raymond Chandler books.

Posted by Stan on May 3, 2007 5:54 PM  | Permalink | Family: The Horror… | Digg It