In 1980, I was living and working in Toronto, Ontario Canada, in my late 30s. I was contentedly single, and thought I had no enemies.

Things started to just go wrong. My clothing seams started to give out very quickly, sometimes on nearly new items, and I tend to have less clothes but purchase high quality items for durability. Pockets in winter coats. Crotches and armpits. Often the crotches would develop a pattern of many small holes that looked like someone had been pushing a pencil through the cloth. Each time I picked up the clothing, the holes would get larger then merge into two large holes either side of the crotch center or seam.

I wrote it off as "poor quality goods these days".

Then I began to notice strange (not known to me) men staring at me very hard with obvious hostility as I walked about the community, especially in the area where I lived. "Oh well, must be a lot of nut cases around here" was my excuse.

Certain of the neighbours in my apartment building became unfriendly, for no reason that I could see. Some of them began to play extremely loud radios or stereos into the small (12-unit) building hallway, and would slam doors. "Oh well, must have a scew loose," I said to myself.

Strange (not known to me) men would buzz my apartment doorbell long and loud. I did not let them in, and I was not interested in their company anyway.

I was on the second floor front, and I noticed young guys standing on the sidewalk and pointing directly at my window. Looked for all the world as if they had just been let out of the local jail. "Huh?" I asked myself, and didn't pay much attention.

I began to 'pop' wide awake in the middle of the night and stay wide awake, almost so awake I couldn't even remain on the bed, even though the environment was quiet, I had taken no stimulants, and was tired and really needed sleep for the next day at work. I spent a good many nights tortured by the inability to fall asleep. But something was odd: For months on end, these nightly pop-awakings always happened at PRECISELY the same time on the clock. EXACTLY midnight, for example. Then the exact time might shift to 2:00 am, say, and this would continue for another several months. Once awake, I'd lie there until close to wake up time, then a minute or two before the alarm clock went off, I'd fall into a deep sleep.

I don't know how this is accomplished, but it seems as if some sort of electronic equipment is responsible. It sure makes getting through a day's work difficult, I can tell you! And recovery on weekends eats up most of the time you'd rather be doing other things. This started at the same time the other problems did, so I am certain it is connected to them.

This went on until the recession of 1982, at which time the engineering firm I worked for had a severe shortage of work and I was on the street. By God's grace, I was able to qualify for a 15-month government sponsored training program in computer programming and related skills. I was able to share an apartment with another gal who had lost her job as store manager due to slumping sales closer to the training program held in a suburban community college.

Never had to work so hard. It took me 60 hours a week for the entire 15 months to keep up. Way harder than university had been. When our class of middle aged retrainees finished, we looked like dogs so tired they stand with legs spread out and tongues reaching the ground. We all vowed NEVER to go through that again!

During this course, I began to experience the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome. I had always needed more rest than other folks, ever since a major fatigue attack in grade 1. I have since discovered that these fatigue attacks MAY be artificial - they seem to occur when I have something important to do, and that retraining course was definitely one such thing.

I noticed that whatever computer I sat at in the computer lab, were we spent quite a bit of time, didn't quite operate as well as it should, and others in the class of about 30 didn't have the same problems. Some of the computers were tied to a mainframe. At the end of each programming session, we each needed to print our work on a network printer to take home for "desk checking". Unlike my classmates, my print jobs kept getting moved to the rear of the printing queue, meaning I had to wait from a half to a full hour longer than my classmates to leave.

It was crystal clear someone was hacking my print jobs.

We had to make one semester project presentation. It was required that our report illustrations had to be transferred to slides and projected. We would sign out a projector and hold it in our locker until presentation day. I spent a great deal of time familiarizing myself with the projector and verifying that every function worked flawlessly. Yet, on the big day, the projector would not work, and I had to both present and manually insert the slides. No one else had such a problem. I suspect, but don't know how, someone broke into my combination locked locker and sabotaged the projector.

When the course was over, I was again blessed. My roommate during the course had obtained a job with a company which both wrote very high tech software and manufactured matching circuit boards to go with the software. ("Emulation" boards and software which allowed PCs to operate as terminals connected to a variety of mainframes.) She got me on board too. This job promised real hands-on technical work. (My former roommate was not the technical type and was hired as an area sales rep.)

As time went on, I noticed a strange pattern. Whatever I had accomplished the day before, either software or hardware, "kind of had something wrong with it" the following morning. I was there four years. The pattern continued so consistently that by the end of the first year, I could clearly see that sabotage was occurring. I could also see that I was the only one there to whom this was happening.

Once in a while, entire pieces of the PC or PCs I was using went missing, OVERNIGHT. I would sometimes come in and find the screws holding the seat of my chair were all removed, causing some near falls. Even stranger, I spent a couple of those years in a large product test lab with an average of 40-50 PCs, and I often worked alone there.

There were perhaps a hundred individual fluorescent tubes over this area, something like 25 4-tube fixtures. I began to notice each day that more and more of these fixtures would have fairly new tubes "gone bad", and the plastic covers were dislodged. I made a complaint to the building manager after it was too dark to do useful work, and he had all the tubes replaced at one time. Within two months it was almost as dark as before the replacement. This time the building manager ignored my request to fix the tubes again. None of the supervisors were interested in finding out why this was happening.

Eventually that company packed up and moved to the United States. I was blessed a third time because one of the seniour accountants had found a job as general manager of a company in nearby Hamilton, Ontario, and she hired me to look after the computer system, as well as some drafting work. "Great", I thought - after working in that high tech nut house this will be a breeze.

The "breeze" turned out more like a tornado. Weird inexplicable troubles I could not diagnose happened immediately and kept up for the entire 8 years I was with that company. Every PC had its own uninterrupted power supply, (UPS), a small box about the size of a lunchbox into which the PC plugged, and kept the PC running for a few minutes in the event of a prolonged power outage. This allowed the operator to sign off smoothly without loss of data.

These units cost around $300 each. Because data loss can be extremely expensive, and because UPS users have tried to sue the UPS manufacturers for such losses, these units are heavy duty and assembled with great care. The screws attaching critical components are even installed with a TORQUE WRENCH, for those with technical experience. The units were all between a year and a couple of years old. One would expect at least 5 years minimum before they start giving trouble. They are very low tech, meaning there is not a lot of tricky circuitry to go wrong.

The moment I arrived, they started to fail in large numbers. No apparent reason. The first year I had to replace 13 of them. They would suddenly shut off the attached computer for no apparent reason, causing data loss, then came back on again. There was no repair option. The user could only purchase a "reconditioned" unit at almost the price of a new one, so it was never in the company's interest to replace one with another which had hours on it already.

I was not the programmer, I was more the operator and hands on installation and modification person, though I did auxiliary programming, such as a system which could be used when the primary host ("mainframe") was down. The programmer who supported the accounting system itself was one of the rare wizards who needs no sleep and has a photographic memory. These people are truly amazing if you ever get to work with one. We got along well.

He had a number of clients and agreed that the replacement of all the UPS units was a genuine mystery. I spent months going over every inch of the building wiring, sometimes with the help of very qualified industrial electricians, rented test equipment, found nothing that could explain the loss of so many UPS's.

I installed banks of 12 to 24 modems for customers to dial in and enter their own orders (we didn't use the Internet, this was the owner's preference). Every single phone line I ordered installed worked when the installer was there, but failed again the next day. Brand new high quality modems would refuse to hang up, necessitating expensive custom-designed hardware to monitor their performance and correct their anomalous glitches. (Since I designed and built the hardware, you guessed it, I'd come in in the morning and find, say, relays pulled just far enough out of their sockets so the monitor unit wouldn't work.)

I also found that equipment I purchased was far more likely to fail than that brought in by the accounting system programmer consultant. PCs and printers failed at a rate which he could hardly believe. It got so bad that I would have to hand the tools to someone else, and give them step by step instructions on how to fix their own machine. Towards the end of my 8 years there, every machine I touched either had more problems the next day, or, was totally dead without apparent cause.

Utility programs I would write for various departments began to fail, always the NEXT DAY. Using well established procedures, I was no longer able to set up simple networking connections. Various consultants could simply not believe that my CORRECTLY written programs refused to work.

More than that, my fatigue attacks were stepped up considerably and I was having to literally lie down on a foam mattress in the mainframe room for up to half an hour just to function at all. I had explained to the managers that I seemed to be under some sort of attacks but could not explain them. God blessed me again in that my involuntary 'naps' didn't get me fired. I can't imagine how this can be done, but I have heard that some kind of Russian radio transmitter exists which can put people near it to sleep involuntarily.

One day, I was doing a particularly critical copying of very large files on the mainframe, and was being hit with massive fatigue at the same time. I screwed up and ended up erasing the best part of a day's sales, a value of over a million dollars. I resigned on the spot - for some time I knew that I was not giving them fair value for the salary, and was attracting sabotage at a high rate besides.

I took a job as a security guard to keep body and soul together, as I had hoped that such a job would be less subject to sabotage than the high salary technical positions. I worked for three years until I qualified for a government early retirement pension.

Working as a security guard outdoors at a city parkade wasn't exactly fun, but it kept the sheriff away. Harassment still continued, but thanks to God, not to the point where the harassment threatened the reputation of my guard agency. I dealt with obtreperous teenagers and homeless men wandering through, firecrackers tossed in the 7-storey structure, vandalism to the booths and gates, and something that happened to me more than other guards: Vomit and excrement placed on my night watch, and which I had the pleasure of cleaning up before the customers came in in the morning.

I was alone at night, though supervisors were patrolling in cars. I had more than my share of "bad radios" that no one else seemed to have. The magnetic strip bar code scanners, used to verify we did our rounds on time, seemed to fail for me and not others, indicating a sabotaged scanner.