Creepy Phone Calls

My coworker just got a creepy phone call during which some lady asked her why she wasn't at a convention and kept calling her names. It turned out to be a prank, but it reminded me of a very weird phone call I got when I was working the front desk at the ol' Old Courthouse Museum. Unfortunately, I don't think my call was a prank. Just some strange man/woman.

Here's the story from March 10, 2005:
Last Friday I got this call at work from an old lady who said she lived in North Dakota in a 27 room mansion decorated in the Victorian style. She said I had a nice phone voice and wanted to send a commendation on my behalf to my boss. I thought that was nice of her and she kept chatting with me so I kept talking to her. Then it got weird. She asked me what kind of furniture she had in her house. I told her, "if you live in a Victorian decorated house you probably have Victorian era furniture." She agreed, but wanted to know specifically what kind of furniture she had. I told her that I didn't live with her so I would not know specifically what kind of furniture she had. But she just kept asking me to describe it. Then she wanted to know what kinds of clothes she wears and what kinds of clothing I would wear if I lived with her. I had to go through every piece including stockings, gloves, corset, petticoats, pinafore and hat. I had to pretend I was 10 years old and call this lady "matron" every time I addressed her (although it sounded more like a man pretending to be an old lady). The she said I would have to be very submissive the whole time and if I got a spot on my dress I would have to apologize to her before I cleaned it off. When she started to tell me she would need to inspect my clothing to make sure I was wearing everything I knew it was time to end this 30-minute call. What kind of a psycho invents a world like that and makes random people play along?

Yesterday (Wednesday) she called back. The first time I told her I wasn't able to have a lengthy conversation with her again, but if she would like some information on Victorian era clothing I could send her some if I could just get her name and address. The name she gave me was different than the week before and this time she lived on Flotilla Lane in Santa Maria, CA (but she didn't know the zip code - who doesn't know their zip code?). After she hung up I looked up Flotilla Lane in Santa Maria. Yep, there is no Flotilla Lane. Totally bogus.

She called back five minutes later asking if I knew of any other museums in Sioux Falls. I probably shouldn't have, but I gave her the name of another museum just to get her off my back. Ten minutes later she called back again. This time she cut the act and I could tell it was really a man and not a woman. He said he was sorry for all the phone calls and promised it wouldn't happen again - he just had a "lapse in consciousness." I told him that I worked for the county and the Sheriff's Department could track our phone calls so he better not call back. He apologized again and hopefully I will never hear from him again. There are some messed up people out there.


Too bad I don't work at a front desk anymore answering all sorts of calls. I might have better stories!

Wrong Mummy

I thought the Queen Tiye in the article from my last post was the same Queen Tiye a few people want to associate to our mummy. Turns out there was more than one Queen Tiye. The search for evidence continues.

"the penis of Tutankhamen, ...

... which is no longer attached to the body, is well developed.”

How about that? Keep that quote to pull out at dinner parties to sound both funny and educated. Curious about the context? Check out this article a coworker sent me today.

Another interesting note about this article relates to one of the mummies we have in the museum. The museum's founder is really convinced our braided hair mummy is the famous Queen Tiye. He want her to be someone special from Egyptian history, but she probably is not. He's had a couple Egyptologists, a proctologist (to use the colonoscopy machine on the mummy), and a gynecologist/amateur Egyptologist take a look at it. So far no one has been able to say if she is Queen Tiye or not, but most of the specialists concluded she probably was not. Now it looks as though there is DNA evidence that some other mummy is Queen Tiye. I'm not really sure what methods they went through to analyze the DNA. I know from some other ancient DNA studies I have read that the stuff is pretty fragile, fragmented, and very easily contaminated. At any rate, interesting stuff.

Snow

It's snowing again here in Wichita, KS. I like it, really puts me in the winter spirit. Last week it snowed quite a bit and the museum closed so I got a day off. It reminded me of school snow days growing up. There was so much snow that I actually could not get my car down my driveway to the asphalt road. But I could walk down my driveway so Emma (the dog) and I went for a walk while it was lightly snowing. Invigorating! I think she really liked it too.