While I was in school, I worked at a shop as a cashier. One day, a man came in and he looked a little bit weird. He was wearing a dungarees with no shirt on. He was there to buy a packet of cigarettes. While I was ringin up his purchase he kept telling me: “I know what you’ve done.” That was rather creepy. It reminded me of the movie “Fallen” and it was definitely making me very uncomfortable. I kept on wondering what he was referring to. I was wondering who he had been talking to and who was talking about me behind my back. I didn’t know him, but it seemed like he know me and I’d never seen this guy before this incident. In the end he took his cigarettes, he paid and he left. It was great to be rid of him, except I wasn’t.
Later on that same day I was standing at the fridge with my back to the shop entrance. I was packing away the pies for the day. Somebody came into the shop and immediately after that you could hear the security guard, who also doubled as the merchandiser and packer, run away. Something is obviously wrong so I turn to see what is going on. The guy from earlier is back, but this time he is butt naked.
He goes in behind the counter and tries to take the cash register. Yes, you heard right, he tries to take the whole cash register and take off with it. I go in behind the counter as well, because he’s obviously going to cause trouble and I feel I need to stop him. I get him to put the cash register down. I get in behind him and take him by his arms and guide him out from behind the counter. He wasn’t violent, he wasn’t armed either. He was naked so it wasn’t like he could be hiding a knife or anything, but I was ready for anything at that point. I took him to the door and told him to go. He left without objecting or making a scene. I felt a bit bad about making him walk out of the shop naked, but he came naked out of his own free will, and I didn’t feel like keeping him around, so it was the only option.
I was pretty calm about the whole thing, but the store was connected to a petrol station, and the petrol attendants panicked when they saw the guy walk into the shop. They pressed the alarm button and the armed response showed up about 20 minutes later. The patrolman gave me a hard time for being so calm about the whole thing, but I thought he was being a bit of an idiot.
The following day, I was called in by management. They asked me about the incident and showed me CCTV footage of what happened the previous night after we locked the shop and left. After we locked up and left, the guy came back, he was naked again.
You need to understand that after we lock the shops door we further lock the shop by bringing a steel roller door door down and locking it as well. The steel roller door covers the entire front of the shop to the extent that you can’t even look into the shop. This man came back and tried to walk through the roller door. He walked into it hard and repeatedly, staggering backwards with the force of hitting it. Eventually, the police came and picked him up. They threw him in the back of their police van and off they went.
The following day the guy came back. This time, thankfully, he was fully clothed. The police obviously let him go. He was very apologetic about what had happened and explained that he was going through a lot of stress. During the incident of the previous day he had blacked out and he could only remember bits of what had happened. He explained that his wife was divorcing him, his daughter had recently been raped and that he wasn’t dealing with it very well. I suppose stress was making him crack. After we chatted for a bit, he left and all seemed well.
Later, I got some more facts together and it turned that the “I know what you’ve done” thing and the trying to walk through the steel roller door, etc. was all connected to the fact that this guy blacked out and then believed that he was God. It was all related to illusions of grandeur. This story serves to illustrate how mental illness can manifest without warning. Sometimes life pushes you too far. So don’t get too judgy towards people that you don’t know. You don’t know there story and you don’t know what they are going through.
That has by far been my weirdest experience in a food store