Katie the Creepy

I'm a fairly rational person, but one colleague never fails to give me the heeby-jeebies. Katie is nearly 60 (she's retiring next year), and about can't be much more than 5 foot tall. Maybe it's her short stature, but she seems to glide silently round the office, and always tends to appear behind you when you least expect it. When my desk faced away from the door, I would often turn around after working intently and find her standing just out of sight, waiting. She will never try to attract your attention, she just stands. Staring at you. Where you can't see her.

 

Katie is admin support on an account I used to work on, and my first contact with her was during team meetings, where she would take the minutes by hand. She has small, very neat writing, and she writes with deliberation. Always. We would often have to repeat things 3 or 4 times so that she could write them down, slowly and in full (abbreviations are the Devil's Work according to Katie, Super-Christian Lady that she is...).

 

Katie never moderates her pace. Everything is slow and ponderous, but I think this is just so that she can always creep up behind people, waiting for them to turn away from the printer and walk away at a normal pace, but jump out of their skins because Katie is standing there. And then she smiles at them, creepily and silently. And then she will carry on at the same pace, never quite moving out of the way in time if someone is rushing past, so that people often bounce off the wall rather than bump into her. I'm not sure whether this is because they're too polite to bump into her, or because they're scared of the consequences if they did...