Blue's Clues and the Roach Theory

[Anonymous <auto20200@hushmail.com>]

BLUE’S CLUES* and the COCKROACH THEORY**

*Blues Clues is a game on Nick Jr. television where you 
have to figure out what "Blue" wants you to do without 
being told in words.

I would like to correspond with anyone who has had 
experiences similar to mine, so please email me at 
auto20200@hushmail.com 

BLUE’S CLUES?
I didn’t know what he wanted.  I had my suspicions, but 
I was never really sure.  Even after people started telling 
me that he was trying to pressure me into initiating a 
relationship with him, I had trouble believing it.  I didn't think that the managers would harass me on his behalf if his object was sexual conquest.  I didn't believe that managers from two corporations and a government agency 
would try to force me into the bed of a stalker.

During my first two years at Company XYZ, my salary went 
up 50%.  I received unasked-for raises of 10%, 9%, 8%, 
and 7% every six months.  Shortly after my third, 
unanticipated and unsolicited raise, I was told to go 
get another job.  No warning or explanation was given.  
Then management began taking steps to fire me.  (Later 
I found out that during the whole time I had been 
getting 8, 9, and 10% unsolicited raises every six 
months and had been receiving good performance 
appraisals, I had been making mistakes of which I had 
never been informed, mistakes that had been given to 
my co-workers to correct.)  The environment became 
increasingly hostile, threatening, and intimidating, 
and I became the target of unpleasant gossip.  

Meanwhile, there was also gossip that the highest level 
manager in my department was sexually harassing me, gossip 
that circumstantial evidence seemed to support.   I wasn't 
sure if the harassment was *sexual* harassment; I thought 
it was also possible that, instead, I was being harassed 
because I had made mistakes at my job.  So I never filed 
a sexual harassment complaint or told my suspicions to 
anyone at that company. (In fact, on several occasions I 
denied that there was any sexual harassment.)   

I decided to get a job with the Federal government because 
I thought I would be safe from the high-level manager in 
case he tried to get me fired or something.

Several days after I started work in the government, my 
supervisors told me to go get another job.  I found out 
that my disgruntled former employer was calling my new 
managers to complain about me.   I told my new managers 
what had happened at XYZ and the upper level managers 
said that I was safe with the government and to just 
wait for the man to stop complaining about me.  They 
said that I would be evaluated on the work I did in the 
government, not my work at XYZ.  Then the managers 
stopped giving me assignments and began making 
arrangements to contract out the work I had been hired 
to do.  I received no work for months.  When I asked for 
work, I was told there wasn’t any, although other 
employees continued to receive assignments.   (Eventually, 
much later, I did receive work again, but the work I had 
been hired to perform was given to a contractor, and I 
was given the job of monitoring the contractor.)  I 
found out that my Branch Chief was telling upper level 
managers things about my performance that weren’t true.  
The environment was hostile and intimidating.  The managers 
kept telling me to leave. 

After waiting two months for the harassment to end, I 
complained to Company XYZ, hoping that they would stop 
their manager from calling my new employer.  The 
government managers told me they would not support me 
that the disgruntled manager was calling them.  Company XYZ 
said they could not help since the government managers 
refused to name the caller.   

After that the harassment got worse.  The Branch Chief 
told me that "success depends on who you know and who you 
blow."  He began coming into my office in the mornings 
and repeating back to me everything my husband and I had 
said and done in our apartment the night before.  If I 
was listening to my Walkman, he would come up behind me 
and talk loudly enough to be heard over the music.  One 
day he came in and repeated back to me, word for word, a 
conversation my husband and I had had in bed. 

I started receiving threats that the harasser at 
Company XYZ would use his influence to get my husband 
fired from his job.  Then the department that the 
harasser managed at Company XYZ began negotiating to buy 
hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment from 
my husband’s company.  Then my husband’s managers began 
harassing him.

I still didn’t know what the harasser wanted.  People told 
me that he was trying to force me to initiate a 
relationship with him, but I had trouble believing that.  
At that time, I didn’t understand sexual obsession, had 
never heard of stalkers.  And I didn’t understand, if it 
was true that he was trying to force me, why so many 
people were helping him.  I had a Readers Digest view of 
the world and I didn’t believe that the managers would 
help the stalker just because he was a man of power and 
influence. 

For a time, I thought that I was Moby Dick to the 
harasser’s Captain Ahab; the great white whale was the 
target of the whaling captain’s vengeance because it had 
maimed the man while fighting for its life.  There had 
been gossip at Company XYZ ... gossip that the man was 
sexually harassing me.  I did not initiate, encourage, 
or corroborate the gossip, but maybe he blamed me for it 
anyway.  I had heard that the man was mad at me because 
I had "set him up so that everyone would see what he was 
doing."  I don’t know what reason I would have had for 
"setting him up," or how he could think it was possible 
for me to have engineered the "setup," but Captain Ahab’s 
reasoning always escaped me, too.  

By this time, it was more than six months since I had 
left Company XYZ and there was no sign that the harasser 
was going to stop.  Thinking that he might be harassing 
me because he was mad about the gossip, or because he 
was mad that I had complained about the telephone calls 
to my employer, or because he was waging a several-years-
long preemptive strike intended to prevent me from filing 
a complaint, I called him and tried to talk to him, 
offered to help him.  He refused the offer. 

And then things got worse.

The harassment continued over the next year.  Sometimes 
I thought I was crazy.  Maybe our apartment wasn’t being 
bugged.  Maybe the stalker wasn’t calling the Branch 
Chief and telling him to taunt me that he knew what went 
on in my bedroom at night.  Maybe my bags and my desk 
were not being searched whenever I went out of the office.  
Maybe my telephone calls were not being monitored.  
Maybe the "impossible" assignments I was sometimes given 
weren’t "setups."  Maybe my co-workers weren’t shunning 
me; maybe, in spite of the remarks they made to me, they 
hadn’t been told that I was stealing computers from the 
government; maybe they hadn’t been told that I’m a lying, 
thieving, blackmailing, drugged-out prostitute. 

And yet it was a fact that the XYZ manager was calling 
government managers and that my co-workers were being 
instructed to spy on me.  It was a fact that the 
minicomputer server had been sabotaged, that someone had 
switched around the wires that connected *my* PC to the 
mainframe and had prevented me from making a connection 
on two consecutive weekends when it was crucial that I 
work.  It was a fact that I was given assignments that 
were difficult or logistically impossible to complete.

Nine months after I left Company XYZ, my lawyer wrote a 
letter telling them to leave me alone.  I heard then that 
the XYZ manager said that he was going to "get everyone 
in the world against me."  After that, strangers would 
come up to me in the halls at work, or on the street 
outside and say "Good lu-uck," in an ominous tone of 
voice.  Or they would insult me.  Then my husband was 
removed from his job in sales, even though his 
performance had been so exemplary he had made the company’s 
all-stars roster.  That same week, my brother told me 
that his job had been threatened also.  Then my insurance 
company dropped my auto insurance because they suddenly 
decided that they didn’t want my husband of 13 years to 
drive our car. 

Maybe I was mistaken in believing that those incidents 
were caused by the corporate executives using their 
influence.  Maybe I was mistaken in believing that I was 
being stalked in the halls at work and in the streets 
outside of work.  That people in restaurants were 
eavesdropping on our conversations and reporting on what 
we had said -- maybe it was coincidence that my co-workers 
would repeat back to me parts of conversations that my 
husband and I had had in restaurants and at home.  And 
maybe I was mistaken in believing that the co-worker who 
began dialing the phone every night as soon as I started 
getting ready to leave was notifying someone to mobilize 
the groups of people who would be waiting near the 
elevators to say things *to* me and *near* me, in order 
to intimidate me.  That the men in stores or in doctors’ 
offices who snatched my hand and caressed and fondled it 
had been instructed to do so by someone wielding his 
power.  Maybe I was just suffering from some kind of 
persecution complex.  

And yet the mental health professionals I consulted said 
I was not.  

And it was a fact that the people in one group I joined 
*had* been given instructions to say some of those things 
I found so frightening.  It was a fact that I overheard 
someone standing in one of those little groups in the 
hall telling the others that they were supposed to watch 
for a woman who was "never at her desk."  It was a fact 
that I once overheard some store clerks saying that they 
had been given a description of someone and had been 
given instructions on what to say when that person was 
around, and it was a fact that I had once seen a seedy-
looking young man, unknown to me, point me out to another 
shopper.
 
I did not know how to get Company XYZ to stop harassing 
me or where to get help.  The lower-level managers in 
the government were harassing me.  The higher level 
managers told me to do nothing; to just ignore the 
obsessed stalker until he tired of tormenting me.  They 
*all* told me they would deny that the stalker had ever 
called; the Branch Chief told me that every manager was 
"prepared to swear" that the man had never called.  

At one time, some of the managers took steps to help me, 
but they stopped after a couple of months.  I was 
informed that top management at the agency I worked for 
had given instructions that no one was to help me.  I 
heard that the Secretary of ___, the head of the 
government Department I worked for, had said that no one 
was to help me.  That if I died, they might conduct an 
investigation, but only *after* I died.

I had called the top manager in my former department at 
Company XYZ long ago and tried to talk to him.  I had 
written a hysterical letter to the President of Company 
XYZ, begging for help.  

At first, I couldn’t even get help from lawyers.  The 
first lawyer I consulted refused to take the case when I 
told him the name of the company harassing me; he said 
that he had represented some of their employees in the 
past and wasn’t anxious to go up against them again.  
One lawyer didn’t believe that I was being harassed; he 
told me to "see a psychiatrist."  Another lawyer said 
that the stalker’s behavior pattern was that of an 
obsessed, rejected lover and that if I just ignored him 
he would get bored and go away.  (The harassment had been 
going on for more than two years by that time.)  When I 
had finally found a lawyer to take my case and she had 
written to Company XYZ, the harassment had gotten worse.  

My counselors and doctors told me that they couldn’t 
help me.  One counselor told me to seek help from 
managers at a higher level than the ones who had been 
induced to harass me.  Another counselor, one who had 
told me that the men in my office were trying to "drive 
me crazy," said that the harasser wasn’t "hurting" me 
and to hire a lawyer or financial advisor.  A doctor 
told me that anti-depressants or other medication wouldn’t 
help me because my problems came from external sources.  
The last counselor I consulted refused to let me talk 
about the situation at all; when I tried to talk about 
it, she put her finger to her lips and shushed me, and 
then began to talk about "bugs." 

I was told that the harasser must lie awake nights thinking 
up ways to make my life miserable and I should just 
ignore him. 
							
The Departmental Security Office told me that they 
couldn’t help me unless I was threatened directly; that 
if people walking past me talking "amongst themselves" 
made threats, there was nothing Security could do.  

About a year and a half after I started working for the 
government, after our office had been moved to a state 
with an anti-stalking law, the Branch Chief, using the 
Blue’s Clues method of communication, let me know that I 
should go to the police and file a complaint.  When the 
officer at the police station entered the room, he 
extended his hand like he was going to shake mine, then 
he grabbed my hand and caressed and squeezed and fondled 
my fingers.  Then he refused to look at my documentation, 
refused even to talk to me.

Shortly after that, I heard that the government managers 
had made a deal with Company XYZ where they agreed that 
they would tell everyone that I am a liar and that I had 
fabricated the story about the XYZ manager’s phone calls.  

This was not acceptable to me.

I heard that the man harassing me had decided that he 
would stop if I would sign something promising not to 
talk about what he had done to me.  I was willing to do 
that--I had *offered* to help him when I had talked to 
him a year earlier.

As soon as I began to try to get in touch with the XYZ 
manager, though, I began to receive threats from my 
government employer.  I heard that if I did anything 
that let the XYZ manager off the hook, the government 
managers would continue to harass me.  It was a 
Presidential election year, and the government managers 
let me know that they would fire me after the election, 
or downgrade me to a typist.  The Branch Chief called me 
into his office and told me (again) to leave.  He said 
that they didn’t want people there who "bring trouble" 
to them.

I heard that the government managers had decided to stop 
helping the XYZ man stalk me because he had landed on 
the other side of the political fence.  I heard that the 
government managers wanted to use me as a weapon in their 
politics.

>From then on, I was harassed and terrorized by both 
sides.  I began to receive death threats.

I resigned and began looking for work I could do from home.  
My husband was concerned about my mental health; during this 
whole time he had refused to believe that I was being harassed 
in any way.  I am a skeptical person who needs proof before 
believing something, but my husband is even worse.  If you 
ask him what color a car is he will say that the side facing 
him is blue.  Even though I had had confirmation that 
Company XYZ was calling my government managers, my 
husband would not believe it.  After I resigned, he went 
to his company’s psychiatrist, who told him that I am a 
manic-depressive. (I do not have manic-depressive illness, 
but I guess labeling me with that illness was preferable 
to admitting that their company harassed my husband 
because his wife wouldn’t give sex to one of their 
customers.)  My husband's company psychiatrist told him 
that he should throw me out of the house (this is how 
you cure mentally ill people: you take away their life 
support and "shock" them into taking responsibility for 
getting well.) 

My husband told me to leave and I moved out.  For several 
years after that, whenever I ventured out, whether to 
stores, church, or library, I would be approached by 
people saying threatening things whenever they came near 
me: they would kill me; they would "get" me; I would be 
easy to poison; my pets would be killed; my family would 
all lose their jobs; my nieces and nephews would be 
infected with disease.  

The End

**THE COCKROACH THEORY 
(If you find *one*, there are probably more.)