Friday, May 29, 2015

Man, Girl, and What the Witness Saw

Someone posted the below on Facebook. Several times I stopped myself from commenting on the post, as I did not want to be a complete ass. Instead, I will be just a regular ass and make fun of the post here.

“Just watched a 50-something man drive up to a blonde teenage girl to "ask directions" in a back parking lot at a mall. She had parked as far away as possible from the store she was leaving and was trekking across the middle of the parking lot when he pulled up to her. Really? He had to have her help? That's so creepy and sure could've ended differently.”

This post says little to nothing about the man and the girl. This post says everything about the person who witnessed it. The comments were supportive by declaring the situation to indeed be “creepy” and “scary.” What I find scary is how witnessing this simple exchange brings out such fear and paranoia.

The post included the location, a more recently built shopping mall, which means there is no back parking lot. Modern shopping malls all have one big parking lot encircling the mall. Let’s just say it was a more remote section of mall parking, if the girl was able to park so far away that she has to trek across the middle of the parking lot to reach her car, then that doesn’t sound at all like a back parking lot. The witness has included “back parking lot” in the story because it adds a level of danger. The girl was not out in the open, in a more public parking lot, for anyone to see, the girl was in a back parking lot, just one step up from a back alley, where we all know perverts linger, just waiting to do nasty things to unsuspecting blonde teenage girls.

It should be pointed out that the post was made at 2:14PM. And since the witness claims to have “just watched” this exchange, then it occurred approximately 2PM on a weekday afternoon. Bad things don’t happen in back alleys … ummm, back parking lots … only in the middle of the night. So I guess this one is a wash. Girls are abducted by strangers in broad daylight all the time!

The man talked to the girl to “ask directions.” Since the witness provides no additional information on this point then we must assume the man did indeed ask directions. Why the quotation marks? Hmmm …

  • “Excuse me, pretty blonde vulnerable defenseless naïve virgin teenage girl, can you tell me where I might find … DICK’s Sporting Goods?”
  • “Hello there, blonde just –asking-for-it teenage girl, how exactly can I find my way into your pants?”
  • “Greetings, my pretty, is there a Victoria’s Secret in this mall? I need to buy some clean, fresh, pure, white panties for my daughters who I assure you I am keeping save from the world by home schooling them and never letting them out of my sight or the sight of an approved guardian, but I do like to see them wearing clean, fresh, pure, white panties … what kind of panties are you wearing?
  • “Good afternoon, blonde teenage girl, I am going to pretend to ask you directions so I may ogle you, and maybe stuff you into my trunk if it weren’t 2PM in the afternoon, and we weren’t in the middle of this back parking lot, and that lady over there wasn’t witnessing this entire exchange."

How did it actually end? We must assume the man asked directions, and then the girl provided directions, and then the man drove off, and the girl proceeded to her car.
How could it have “ended differently?”
  1. She doesn’t give him directions.
  2. She gives him directions but they suck and he still can’t find what he is looking for.
  3. The girl pulls out a gun and shoots the man dead while he is sitting in his car which is still in gear and his foot falls off the brake pedal and the car idles or creeps slowly across the back parking lot like a wayward shopping cart and hits another car.
  4. A man is hiding in the back of the girl’s car and abducts her.
  5. The witness feels concern during this exchange but the man drives off and the girl walks safely to her car and the witness realizes this was just another regular everyday exchange between two strangers into which she injected her own fear and paranoia which she feels motivated to inject into her own daughter (who was with her at the time) by using this as another teaching moment but then realizes the hundreds of previous teaching moments should suffice where she instructed her daughter that strange men are the most dangerous thing in the world to girls and indeed men are very dangerous to girls but they usually aren’t strangers they are usually family or a friend or a known authority figure and she decides to let the concern pass and not put more of her fears into her daughter because her daughter is probably full-up anyway and the witness never even thinks about relaying the story nor posting it on facebook.