A 42 year-old woman in the Netherlands was recently arrested for stalking her 62 year-old ex-boyfriend. The charge alleges she phoned him 65,000 times over the course of a year. This figure was determined after police seized her cell phone and computer and their techies performed whatever voodoo they do to extract this type of information. When confronted with this total she claimed 65,000 calls were not excessive. Interestingly enough, the man claimed they never had a relationship. This basic contradiction holds a certain tawdry interest, doesn’t it? It’s the stuff of movies, movies starring Tiffani Thiessen and Don Johnson which never make the theaters and go straight-to-video.
Whether or not these people had an actual relationship may be intriguing, but what is especially fascinating about this story is the math. Since the woman didn’t deny making the phone calls, 65,000 must hover in the neighborhood of truth. So with that salient little fact in our grasp, let’s get to the arithmetics!
Using a 24 hour base this averages 178 calls per day, every day. No time off for holidays or weekends. No time off for illness or travel. No time off for good or bad behavior. No time off for nuthin’. It’s a sound bet the stalker woman is not a cyborg; she’s a human being with basic physical needs. As anxious as she may have been to yak it up with her former (or imagined) beau, she needed sleep. Plus time to do other essential things like use the restroom, shower, eat and the like. Even with a very modest six hours of daily sleep and another hour for those other life-sustaining activities, she was left with 17 hours a day to engage in one-way phone tag. If she did nothing else – and I mean *nothing* else – that’s 10½ calls per hour. Or one every 5½ minutes. Think of it this way. If she started listening to Hey Jude while making her first call Paul would still be na-na-na-ing when she placed call number two. That, my friends, is a lot of touch toning. It makes my channel surfing habits look normal and that’s saying something.
We all agree stalking is high on the list of uncool activities, like slam dancing or disparaging Dr. Seuss’ classic Go Dog Go. While this woman justifiably has a lot of explaining in her future, I do have one question for the object of her affection, the 62 year-old stalkee: After the first 40,000 or so phone calls, why didn’t you block her number?
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Trask Avenue 
65,000 reasons to leave your lover
Posted: September 8, 2011 in Observations and CommentaryTags: hanging on the telephone, news, random
A 42 year-old woman in the Netherlands was recently arrested for stalking her 62 year-old ex-boyfriend. The charge alleges she phoned him 65,000 times over the course of a year. This figure was determined after police seized her cell phone and computer and their techies performed whatever voodoo they do to extract this type of information. When confronted with this total she claimed 65,000 calls were not excessive. Interestingly enough, the man claimed they never had a relationship. This basic contradiction holds a certain tawdry interest, doesn’t it? It’s the stuff of movies, movies starring Tiffani Thiessen and Don Johnson which never make the theaters and go straight-to-video.
Whether or not these people had an actual relationship may be intriguing, but what is especially fascinating about this story is the math. Since the woman didn’t deny making the phone calls, 65,000 must hover in the neighborhood of truth. So with that salient little fact in our grasp, let’s get to the arithmetics!
Using a 24 hour base this averages 178 calls per day, every day. No time off for holidays or weekends. No time off for illness or travel. No time off for good or bad behavior. No time off for nuthin’. It’s a sound bet the stalker woman is not a cyborg; she’s a human being with basic physical needs. As anxious as she may have been to yak it up with her former (or imagined) beau, she needed sleep. Plus time to do other essential things like use the restroom, shower, eat and the like. Even with a very modest six hours of daily sleep and another hour for those other life-sustaining activities, she was left with 17 hours a day to engage in one-way phone tag. If she did nothing else – and I mean *nothing* else – that’s 10½ calls per hour. Or one every 5½ minutes. Think of it this way. If she started listening to Hey Jude while making her first call Paul would still be na-na-na-ing when she placed call number two. That, my friends, is a lot of touch toning. It makes my channel surfing habits look normal and that’s saying something.
We all agree stalking is high on the list of uncool activities, like slam dancing or disparaging Dr. Seuss’ classic Go Dog Go. While this woman justifiably has a lot of explaining in her future, I do have one question for the object of her affection, the 62 year-old stalkee: After the first 40,000 or so phone calls, why didn’t you block her number?
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