The stalker thing is real - and I didn’t realize how real until a buddy who’s a moderately-successful YouTuber (750k subs) got his very own.
Thankfully it’s a relatively benign case, but man, it’s real. There’s a kid who, for the past ~10 years, calls him Every. Single. Day. Without fail. For 10 years (that’s 3600+ phone calls). He leaves a voicemail and just talks about his day - what video games he’s playing, etc. I think his mom once called and apologized (although she doesn’t seem to try and stop the behavior, which is also odd, but who knows).
Now imagine the same kind of obsessive behavior, but...less benign. Scary.
A friend of mine is a famous musician and there is a women who somehow pops up on most public events he visits. He's often too nice and hugs her before telling her that she should leave him alone because he's there in private with his friends.
He's always "yes, stalkers bother me a bit, but they aren't that bad"
Well, yes, if it's a small cute woman bothering you now and then it's not that bad, but who has the luck to only get such harmless stalkers?
The way someone looks doesn’t say much about their mental health. Being stalked by someone raises the alarm a bit but sure, not all the time a bad outcome comes of it. Theres the potential to attract nutcases and in my opinion this is a high cost for being famous.
I knew a guy who dated some crazy woman, because "what's the worst that could happen, she's a small woman, haha". Well, he gravely underestimated her abilities...
Reminds me of working on a CRM. Our integration was breaking because one record that was being sent over was 100x bigger than any other record we'd seen during testing.
Turns out some poor fellow had an issue with mental health, not sure the specifics - but every day like clockwork he'd fill in one of our 20 page forms, submit his identification and apply for something. We had records for this same fellow going back 20 years when he first attempted to get involved with our organisation. The team responsible for actioning those forms are familiar with him, and have manually built in steps to ignore his submissions from reporting and extraction..
Whilst debugging this issue I found notes from each new manager that came and went over the years who encountered this fellow. Each had different opinions on what should be done, thankfully humanity reigned and nobody wanting to seek legal measures won.
When debugging this, I noticed the submissions stopped 4 months prior. I looked him up online, lo-and-behold an obituary.
You're talking cell phones, which is perhaps a reasonable assumption in this case. Historically, phone numbers were public in white pages by default though.
Fair enough! I generally think of cell phones when I see the word "voicemail" because we never used that term to describe the messages left on the answering machine my family had when I was a kid; they were just "messages", which at the time was unambiguous when talking about phones :)
It could also result in the stalker never calling again. I guess it’s important to understand the probability of outcomes before just listing negatives.
How? They wouldn't know unless he'd drop the old one. I imagine he isn't calling the kid back to say "hey, got your voice mail, sounds good, keep it up", so the kid wouldn't know that their voice mail goes straight to /dev/null while he uses a different number.
Don't feed the trolls. Being fearful of blocking unwanted calls, so you allow the calls to continue just feeds them. You are telling them this is acceptable.
The trolls have already been fed. If you receive and occasionally take 3000+ calls over a period of years from some crazy person, they think that you’re in some sort of relationship.
Fragile people act out in unpredictable ways. After 10 years, this isn’t a kid anymore.
The stalker thing reminds me of Bjork, the singer and the stalker who wanted to kill her through mail. Very disturbed person developed an obsession with her, imagined her telling him things through her songs and so on. There are plenty of nutcases out there and being famous only paints a target on your back.
Thankfully it’s a relatively benign case, but man, it’s real. There’s a kid who, for the past ~10 years, calls him Every. Single. Day. Without fail. For 10 years (that’s 3600+ phone calls). He leaves a voicemail and just talks about his day - what video games he’s playing, etc. I think his mom once called and apologized (although she doesn’t seem to try and stop the behavior, which is also odd, but who knows).
Now imagine the same kind of obsessive behavior, but...less benign. Scary.