March 2003

This page has been unused for over six months. If you have been following the text being posted to the site you are aware that the main purpose of this site is to find medical care for a family member injured by Subliminal Distraction exposure. Her retirement paperwork has now been filed so that there can be no recourse from her former employer.

Over the next few weeks as I have time I will post the story of how this site came to be. We will probably have to travel out of state to get competent medical care so that I will have less time than usual.  

In our state the constitution dates from the turn of the century. It says that the state cannot be made a defendant in any action. This places University Presidents and other employees of State Universities above the law. There is no action, which can be filed to compel any thing from a State University here.

As long as there is no death or serious physical injury which would involve the local police, rather than University Police, the Administration of these Universities can, by maintaining silence, cover any action they wish to hide.

A recent case involving the University Hospital in Birmingham went all the way to the U S Supreme Court. This involved the American's With Disabilities Act. The state won that case.

I have been told by two attorneys that there is absolutely nothing that can be done to get information from the State University. After reading this site, what do you think?

Check back as I tell this story.

July 2007

Although we travel back to our home in Alabama we now temporarily live with relatives in McDonough Ga. This site began in the fall of  2002 with the first two pages. Since then I have worked when Connie slept or had a good day. The site is now over sixty five megabytes including some high resolution pictures.

The problem I started searching for now has a name, Subliminal Distraction. A Design student in Australia emailed me for permission to use my site in her thesis. No one in the United States knew the correct term or they denied knowing it.

Cubicles have been used for forty years to prevent what designers believe is a harmless episode of confusion and bizarre behavior. The Virginia Tech shooter had the "harmless episode" and killed thirty-two people.

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How it all started

In the early summer of 2002 the University moved payroll offices into the basement of Rose Administration building. There had been objections  to the move by payroll staff. They complained that the space in the basement was smaller and there were no windows. There were suspicions that the move was because someone else in administration wanted the third floor offices with large windows and expansive view Denny Chimes and the President's Mansion.

I had not been well and did not go into the building for several weeks after the move. I drove Connie into work and picked her up each day.

The first evidence that something was wrong  went  un-noticed. Connie had been an active church member, soloist with the choir, and teacher in two church classes for over twenty years.... She stopped going to church. ... At the time the excuse given was reasonable. Later, after the event at work, she would eventually say, "When you mess up they don't let you come back."

The situation was beginning to deteriorate when she began to complain that she was being carefully watched at work. Nothing about his seemed out of the ordinary as it was happening. At  that time I may have thought that her recounting  of the day's work was exaggerated but knowing the sloppy way the University Payroll Office has been run nothing surprised me. As it started it seemed to be a normal dispute in a poorly administered university office.

Although Payroll must meet deadlines the University will not enforce rules to department heads to file timely changes for the deductions on individual personnel accounts.   There had been a constant problem causing overtime of as much as a half hour daily to get late filed changes into the payroll.  After reviewing her paychecks, they were always for the same amounts. I could not find any check reflecting over time. The school operates on a thirty-seven hour week. Even so her pay stubs always show the same bi-weekly amounts. When the previous payroll manager retired he had told me that poor administration was one reason he left.

In a day or so she said her phone had been tapped so they could check up on what she was doing. That sounded odd but the alarm bells did not begin to go off until she explained why she thought the phone was tapped. She had made  payroll changes for a disabled worker. Later she heard the manager and assistant manager discussing that change. Her conclusion was that they must be listening on her phone to have that information. She argued that she saw a man come in and put boxes in the two manager's offices so they could listen in on her calls. When I checked weeks later there actually had been a phone repairman in to fix broken phone lines. She began to say that the payroll manager was trying to 'get something on her' to fire her.

Prempro®, the hormone replacement therapy drug,  was in the news that summer and I suspected she might have a problem with mini strokes. We called her doctor and got a referral to a neurologist without seeing the doctor who prescribed Prempro. The MRI was negative, no strokes. But the day I got that test result she came out to the car and said cameras had been installed to watch her.

She had insisted that she continue working. The neurologist did not see a problem with that. At work she was six blocks from the hospital emergency room while at home we were thirty minutes away through traffic.

I did not know what was going on behind the doors of the Payroll Office. I had no reason to suspect that the Payroll Manager or staff had done anything to cause these changes in Connie's mental state.

I stopped her going to work.

Over the next several weeks the neurologist performed a complete examination including a trans-thoracic and carotid ultrasound, lipids testing, hormone and blood testing, a spinal tap to eliminate MS, CJD, and any latent infection then finally an EEG. He found nothing.  There were constant delays due to vacation schedules.

Neuropsychological testing did not confirm a physical cause for her problem. During the interview for the testing she told the psychologist she felt she should be punished. She broke down and cried in his office and at other doctor's interviews  when she tried to relate the events at the University. She had missing memory surrounding the incident.

I had noted and reported to both the neurologist and psychologist that while she could answer questions with a single possible reply, she could not decide on an answer if a multiple choice question was asked. If I asked her those same questions she had ready answer. She would fill out the information portion of forms with name, address all the way to the point where a decision must be made. She could not do that. This caused a problem in the neurological testing because some of the pen and paper tests required her to make a choice.  The first psychologist said she took seven minutes to draw lines connecting similar symbols on a page.

If you are a student of B. F. Skinner you are aware that randomly applied painful stimulus will cause a laboratory animal to freeze, refusing to move. The phenomenon discussed on this site  is random-subliminal-adverse stimulation of consciousness. The victim is unaware anything is happening to them.

Connie did her full job the last day she worked but within a day or so she could not perform simple math.

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Connie told me and then the neurologist that she had experienced a transient loss of sight. It was significant where she said  it had happened. She said she was performing a solo at church and had a pain in her left eye then could not see the music. She described having to stop singing and walk off the podium. She said she made a fool of herself in front of the whole congregation.

In a phone call to our daughter the story changed. Now she said she had a seizure, fell down, and one of the church members helped her up. I phoned the church member she named and the event did not happen. When I was able to phone several choir members they said  nothing unusual had happened at any time Connie had performed a solo.

It was weeks before I remembered how that first story originated. We were sitting in the car in front of the Administration Building. I was arguing that she should not continue working. I went over the symptoms of stroke eliminating each in turn. When I finished she said, "Well,... there was something else." That is when the loss of sight story came out. When I attempted  to phone church members Connie objected.  Each time I took the phone to call she had insisted I not call any one at church. She said the Payroll Manager had been telling everyone she was faking. 

One of the choir members eventually called me. I learned there had been a different event in choir practice. She had not been able to start singing.

The caller said she opened her mouth to sing but no sound came out. When they asked her she would only say it was the words. Connie gave no explanation for that statement.

Understand, Connie could  speak, but when she tried to sing nothing would come out.

The same choir member worked at Druid City Hospital and related a phone call Connie made to her from the payroll office.  Connie said she thought she was going crazy she could not do her work. I learned of the call several weeks after she stopped working. When I got her to talk about it she said the numbers scrambled and made no sense.

All those  events happened  after June 30, 2002 the day Payroll completed the move into the basement and the day she started using the office workstation without Cubicle Level Protection.

In the last few days, she began to complain of treatment at work at night and said she didn't want to go back. I told her that would be fine and asked her what she wanted to tell her supervisor. The next morning she insisted she was OK and had to go in to work. She was concerned that the burden on her friends would be too much if she stayed home.

Looking back I remembered that I could call her at work in the morning until about eleven. But after then the phone would ring until voice mail picked up. When I asked she said she might have been in meetings. The problem persisted and when I asked again she said there was a problem with the new phone system. Her voice mail was blocking the incoming phone calls. When I asked a third time the answer was that it was a problem with the new phone number she had been assigned. It slipped by me that I was calling the same old number in the mornings when she did answer and in the afternoon when she didn't answer.

I failed to detect that something was happening at work and it got worse as the day progressed.

While filling out the first forms for the psycho-neurological testing there was a question; "Have you been doing any unusual things?"  She answered that she must have because people kept sticking their heads in to see why she did not answer the phone. When I asked the supervisor she denied knowing about that. Several things had happened to make me believe that she did know.

After Connie stopped working I continued to talk to her supervisor when she called me. There were several calls to find out when Connie could come back to work. Connie was already exhibiting psychotic behavior. I refused to put her on the phone. Connie became upset when the phone rang so I put the computer on-line streaming Web Radio. Eventually  the phone did ring while I was outside and Connie answered it. She spoke with her supervisor. The supervisor could not tell she was talking to someone in an altered mental state. I heard Connie answer that she intended to return to her job. I had written  both  the supervisor and office manager telling both that while there was no medical finding I did not believe Connie would ever work anywhere again.

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We received a letter notifying Connie that if she did not supply a medical reason why she could not return the University would consider her  to have abandoned the job. The doctor who prescribed the hormone replacement Prempro® had made the referral to a neurologist without seeing her because we thought it was an emergency situation. While Connie continued to have testing ordered by the neurologist  there was no treating doctor to write a letter if there had been clear findings. The neurologist did say that given her reaction every time the University was mentioned, she probably could not continue there. The neurologist could not find anything physically wrong. We could not get a diagnosis. Because of the Office managers letter,  I began my certified letter campaign to the University. 

I mailed certified letters to the Payroll Manager and the Associate Vice President for Human Resources, for more than six months. I repeated the same question.

Did Connie make any mistakes that came to the attention of the office manager?

He would reply but the text of his letter omitted any reference to my question. One reply told me he could not speak to me only Connie. He specifically said I had no authority to contact him about her employment at the University. Remember, he has been told several times that she is seriously mentally ill and psychotic.

I already knew the answer to the question I asked him.

Connie had been worried about mistakes she had been making. In one case disabled workers were left off insurance rolls so that when they went to their doctors they found they did not have medical insurance. The problem was that the file system had been changed and Connie was not a computer person. She could not find the files she had been using after they were rearranged to a new filing system.

A second incident happened in the fall of 2001. The University payroll was run on a mainframe computer. It used a large half inch magnetic tape like the old style reel to reel audio tapes. But the computer data tape is about eighteen inches in diameter.

Connie's job was to mail the used tape back to be recycled. Her supervisor left the new payroll tape in Connie's work area where it was usually placed when it was to be mailed back. Connie looked at it; put postage on it; then she mailed it back. When they began to look for it, there was no tape. No tape, no payroll.

She told me she had been called into the manager's office for a discussion of the incident. The Payroll Manager later denied there had been such a meeting. He denied any unusual problems ever happened.

When I persisted in asking that question in every letter, the manager and the 'vice President' eventually coordinated the same answer. Connie had not made any mistakes that required disciplinary action.

When Connie was in North Harbor Pavilion I had the doctor determine her mental state in regard to a Power of Attorney. The doctor said her signature would be valid. We had our attorney prepare a Durable Power of Attorney. Several months later an insurance company requested and got a letter from the clinic doctor in Birmingham attesting that the Power of Attorney was valid.

I made copies of the Power of Attorney, had Connie write and sign a note addressed to each recipient on their copy, then  delivered them. Copies went to the Supervisor, Office Manager, Assistant Office manager and Associate Vice President and Department Head, Human Resources.  It made no difference. The office manager and now the Head of the Department of Human Resources would not address my question.

Months later when they both arrived at that standard answer, (Connie had not made any mistakes which rose to a level requiring disciplinary action.) their  statement implied that something did happen but they refuse to say what. I'm sure that never occurred to them that their coordinated statement was an admission of problems with Connie's performance at work.

My position has been that Connie's supervisors knew something I didn't. At a minimum they had noted a problem by July 31st the date of her annual evaluation. The problems increased after the move into the basement,  but they continued to harass her anyway.

They would not answer my question because that would reveal that they had some knowledge before the move to the basement.  The payroll tape incident, caused by the supervisor's carelessness and poor planning of the Office Manager had happened over six months earlier. . Although she did not blame the supervisor, Connie felt that she had been accused for someone else's mistake. It was a large one. If the mistake had not been caught in time an entire University  payroll would have been missed. She complained of the  meeting with the Office manager in which he told her that the mistake could not happen again.

I eventually changed the question I asked in my letters.

When was the office coffee pot placed in Connie Tucker's workspace?

Why was it placed there?

Who had the authority to diminish the quality of anyone's workspace?

Step by step I went up the chain of command to the President of the University. I wrote the Board of Trustees and Governor's office as the head of the Board of Trustees.

There is no reply from the University, President, Associate Vice President Department of Human Relations, Office Manager, Assistant Office Manager, Supervisor, University Council's office, or selected members of the Board of Trustees including Governor Bob Riley.

I sent two questions to OSHA from their online submission site. I followed up with a letter.  There is no psychiatric injury category at OSHA even though the problem has been known for fifty years. I have written Senator Sessions about the failure of OSHA to reply to the three communications. We now live with relatives when we are in Georgia to see Connie's doctors. Since our son is a help desk operator for the US Army we have high speed service here. That's the reason McDonough Ga. appears on these site pages. We still maintain our residence in Alabama.

What the Payroll office did to repair the office workstation was to lock the door from the second section of payroll, keypunch stopping the human traffic through the work area. The new occupant uses the computer so that the workstation has  been  rotated 180 degrees. I communicated the problem to others in the office and understand the person now using that workstation had a warning. But they did not repair the situation that caused Connie's sudden mental break.

The recent Virginia Tech shooter created the same "special circumstances" for exposure from Subliminal Distraction. That is the name of this problem outside the United States, in the field of Design.

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Connie had accumulated over 160 hours of vacation and sick leave.

Her position was a choke point for payroll. She managed all corrections of deductions and payment to insurers for premium payments. Her job had to be finished before the payroll could be completed. She accumulated the sick leave and vacation because they could not allow her off time.

Had Connie quit or retired the sick leave could only be added to 'days of service' to determine the amount of retirement pay. With almost 30 years of service an additional 160 days would have almost no effect on her retirement income. They had to pay about $35,000 over the months she was on leave. They could not hire someone else because her salary while on leave used up the budget.

Beginning attorneys working for the University have a starting salary near that figure. Connie had only a high school education with a few months of business school. She had dropped out of Junior College in Dothan. If the University could replace her with a student wife or other low starting salary hire their budget would have improved.

I have six months of letters from the Payroll Manager demanding that she supply a "medical reason" for her absence. He had been told in several letters and in phone calls with the supervisor that Connie was severely psychotically mentally ill. There was no reference to her health or question about her condition in any of his letters. The Associate Vice President finally realized the omission and commented in her last letter.

They have learned to transact business by phone so that there is no record of what is said. I realized that and began a certified letter writing campaign.

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Employee Evaluations

The employee Annual Evaluations, dated July 31, 2002, had been performed.  I finally found Connie's copy at home in her employment paperwork.

Her ability to perform her job remained at a constant level. On the last page was a comment:

"Connie has skills and knowledge of her job, but have started  to not trust her own judgement. her quality of work is good. Connie needs to improve on her decision making."   Errors of spelling and grammar are correctly quoted.

 I wrote both the Supervisor and Assistant Manager requesting information on that statement and some indication of when any decline had begun. After we executed  the Power of Attorney I added that they should consider this a request from Connie for her own records. There had been a conference between Connie and the two women at the time the evaluation was delivered and signed. I specifically requested to know what they had observed to cause them to write the comment. What had she done that led them to believe she did not trust her own judgment. Neither woman has ever replied.

The letters to all parties expressed how serious our problem was and how much we needed the information. I enclosed a copy of the brochure from the Psycho-neurology clinic explaining that what had happened might point to the source of Connie's problem. We never got a reply from anyone at the University regarding that question.

The letter from the University President said they had supplied all the information they were required to give me.

The University will not reply or answer mail. In that last letter the President of the University declared  the issue closed and said that the  University would not respond to further letters.

I will never understand the workings of the academic bureaucratic mind.  What possible difference will it make whether or not they reply?

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I discovered what had happened about three weeks after the incident in the Payroll Office. The discovery happened when I started looking for a reason anything that serious could happen that fast. I had a vague recollection of a problem in office design. I went over the features of  both locations. In the third floor office the room partitioning had been purchased from an office furniture manufacturer. It had Cubicle Level Protection.

For years the University used Work-Study students to fill in as accounting assistants to keep up with the payroll schedule. None of these students had an individual workstation. Extra chairs were  brought in to allow the students use of available space within each staff members workstation. At times Connie had up to three other people inside the room partitioned Cubicle. This defeated the protective design.

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In the spring of 2002 before the basement incident Connie had been worried about and commented on another person who had a "nervous breakdown." She named the woman at that time. I noted it but cannot remember the name. Connie's circle of acquaintances was limited to work and church. I asked at church. It must have been at the University.  I suspect that the administration has been harassing older workers using a similar method. They could have been causing severe mental outcomes for years. Now they know what caused the previous events.
 

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After she stopped working she began to refuse to go outside. When I got her into the car then drove the fifteen miles into Tuscaloosa, she would refuse to leave the car. On several occasions when I returned to the car she was hiding. One time she was stretched across the two front bucket seats laying her side reading her address book. Another occasion she bent over and picked every piece of paper or lint off the car floor adjacent to her. She was still doing that when I returned even though I couldn't see any thing on the floor.  On a  third occasion she was sitting up but thumbing through that new address book as if reading the pages. It was the first time I noticed, the pages were blank.

From the first days she believed there were thousands of dollars missing because of mistakes she made in her payroll reports. She said some one from accounting came to the payroll office to find out what she had done. Again, when I checked someone from accounting did come to the office but the visit was to find out why too much money was in an account to pay premium money to Blue Cross from payroll deductions and employer contributions. The visit  had nothing to do with Connie according to her supervisor.

The first psychiatrist resigned the case stating that a practicing psychiatrist was not equipped to deal with her problem. He recommended we go to the State University Hospital and School in Birmingham. I succeeded in getting an appointment but before that date she had an episode of crying because I would not take her to the county court house on a Saturday afternoon. She believed a trial was underway about the missing money from the University. This happened in Tuscaloosa. I took her to the emergency room. They transported her to North Harbor Pavilion. North Harbor Pavilion is considered a floor of Druid City Hospital even though the facility is located across the river in Northport.

She told the staff at North Harbor she heard people screaming. While visiting, waiting for her by the TV area, I heard people screaming. There was a PA speaker with a center volume control in the ceiling. The music was opera. When the TV program sound dropped as the TV station switched sources the speaker could just be heard above room noise if you stood under it.

 By this point she was hearing voices, angry mumbling voices. The psychiatrist at North Harbor said she was seriously mentally ill. Remember, she was a normally functioning person before the new workstation exposure and harassment at the University just weeks earlier. She was released to me one day before the appointment in Birmingham. She was in a severe anxiety state. At one point we hit a bump. She shook my arm and said, "Stop, stop the car the wheel is falling off."

We had been assigned to an instructor MD Ph.D. at the clinic in Birmingham. The first diagnosis was that she had pseudo dementia associated with depression. At the second visit a they decided to hospitalize her. The doctor had missed the psychotic elements in the first visit. Tests were repeated including a high contrast  MRI. The diagnosis then was that she was psychotically mentally ill caused by severe depression.

When I explained that there had been an incident at the University in Tuscaloosa they refused to acknowledge that the words had been spoken. In the second meting there were four staff. None of them would acknowledge I said any thing about the campus in Tuscaloosa. When I stopped speaking they pretended I had not spoken and continued where they left off. They supplied their own history. They would not accept a information that reflected on the University. The doctor said, " She's a fine Christian woman who let her worries get the better of her."

My efforts to explain that she had not been depressed were ignored. Their reply to that was that she had been depressed and I just didn't notice it. No matter what I said the answer was that my observation was another sign of depression. They were characterizing events they did not personally observe. Once they arrived at the early decision that this was a case of depression nothing would dissuade them. We had been married thirty three years then. We were together except for the time she was at work. Because of the condition of our cars I drove her everywhere she went. There had been no sign of anything wrong until the University office moved into newly designed offices in the basement. After we returned home I double checked with some of the church members and they too had been surprised by the sudden onset. One remarked that one day Connie had been at church appearing normal and the next weekend  she didn't come to church.

In the interview in Birmingham the doctors first stated that she was psychotic then asked her if she had been depressed. She answered, "Well... a little bit." She would have given them any answer she thought they wanted to hear. They could not understand that a psychotic answer did not have to be obvious and contradict reality. When I stated that she had not been depressed they would not listen. They had already reached a conclusion and the truth arrived too late.

The doctors in Birmingham  insisted she should have ECT. I have family experience with ECT and have better sense. There had been no consistent diagnosis to that point. I remarked in my letter to the Head of the Department that I could not understand their reasoning in the interview. After refusing to acknowledge the harassment in Tuscaloosa they expected me to take their medical advise.  Their discharge diagnosis was Major Depression.

I refused to pay about $800 in un-reimbursed charges after I complained to the head of the department. The clinic doctor said there had been a meeting and the conclusion was that they had supplied an acceptable standard of care. When I argued with the clinic doctor about her  refusal  to include information about harassment in Connie's record her reply was that I could not tell doctors what to do. In my letter to the head of the department I demanded to know if the information about harassment from the Tuscaloosa campus was  included in the file. There has been no reply. The clinic doctor eventually resigned the case citing philosophical differences in treatment methods.

Connie began to talk again about the 'other girl Connie' while in the hospital. This had started in mid December before the first appointment in Birmingham. I told the nurse assigned to her about this and pointed out that she had saved the cake from her lunch to take downstairs to the other girl Connie. This was not recorded because the doctor's nurse called me the next day asking if it was ok to put her in the secure wing because she had begun to wander. We had words and I demanded they release her.

When I picked her up and received the discharge instructions for medication the doctor had forgotten to prescribe the medication. I discovered this after driving fifty miles back to Tuscaloosa.  When I phoned he had left for the day and could not be reached.

They agreed to continue to treat her. With no source for information, my severe disability, and her inability to travel we had little choice. It did not seem to matter which doctor prescribed anti-psychotic medications while I tried to find treatment for her.

The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.

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