Sob Story Guy

The past few weeks have seen an explosion of the number of Tissue People on the T: People with allegedly horrible lives who seek donations in exchange for a small pack of tissues.

Annie Oakenfold, who has been collecting these notes for more than a month now, reports a woman passed the above note and a pack of tissues on the Orange Line tonight. Read more.

Well, what do you know: A man pestering people at South Station for money for an urgent train ride really did have a pressing reason to get back to Framingham.

When this guy started shoving the photographer in the middle of Brookline Avenue, the photographer ran into Starbucks for help.

Via Boston Reddit.

One of the constants of Universal Hub Twitter feed is that people regularly send me updates on the whereabouts of Sob Story Guy and Sob Story Girl (actually, should be plural, since there's more than than one of each).

People really, really hate being confined to a metal tube underground (or just sitting in a restaurant or theater) while an angry or seemingly distraught person demands money to see her kid in Portsmouth or his parole officer in Worcester - especially if story tellers are heading the wrong direction from the train station you'd take to get to those places or if they're repeating the same tear-laden spiels veteran Bostonians have heard for years.

But are these story tellers people with mental disabilities who shouldn't be pointed out and mocked in a public medium? Here's an exchange on Twitter yesterday:

Cactus on the Stair reports on how one Sob Story Guy's night ended with him on the train harassed by a panhandler.

Christoper tweets from Boylston this morning that a Sob Story Guy held a trolley door open and refused to let it close until somebody gave him some money.

How was Sob Story Guy supposed to know people might not take kindly to him sneaking into a movie theater tonight to beg for money?

Around 8:15 p.m. yesterday, Rachel Zarrell spotted Sob Story Guy getting on the Orange Line at Chinatown:

A Dorchester man who admitted conning people out of money last fall through a convincing sob story was sentenced to three years in state prison yesterday, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

As part of a plea agreement in which he was branded "a common and notorious thief" on 25 counts of larceny and "uttering" (writing bogus checks), Williams also agreed to leave Massachusetts within 60 days of his release from prison - and to stay out until at least Dec. 7, 2021 - the District Attorney's office reports, adding Williams already has a 30-page criminal record featuring 35 convictions for larceny-related offenses.