In numerous writings on On being mobbed, I mention an “elderly relative”. The oblique description was intended to protect her privacy, and to protect my relationship with her. She was my mother.
It was my mother that two Albany Police showed up to ask after on Easter Sunday in 2021. Their smirks were obvious despite the balaclavas they wore when they asked me to produce her, as though I had done her harm. It was after they left that I overheard the Albany block coordinator say to the lowlife from the house to the north who was standing at the back of his car, words that were more or less, “That’ll get her out of there.” This I wrote about in Smart meters, carrier current transmission and the mobbers’ radio (part 2).
It was she, my. mother, whose car was broken into at the front of the house, as I wrote about in The mobbers’ “World Wireless System” and hate culture in Albany, California (part 1). It was this victimization of her that the Albany Police were less interested in than whether I insisted that they follow up on a request made days before in email for them to notice an oversized RV parked line-of-sight and in close range to the window of the bedroom in which I was harassed night after night over some radioed device.
It was my mother who lived alone in this house, my childhood home, when a water leak occurred in the basement and continued until her lung collapsed. This is what I keep coming back to when I wonder when the lowlife to the north started mobbing this house.
This is the house that my mother finally left for a senior housing complex in Albany because, she told me, “something” in the house was “bothering” her.
This house is where I’ve fixed a series of water leaks while beginning to understand how the criminals who try to take our homes sabotage household services in their bid to force us out. This is the house where I’ve lived and worked for much of the time over the pandemic.
Senior housing in Albany is where my mother declined and died; it was this housing about which one smirking Albany Police officer said, “That’s expensive.” It is this housing complex that made me realize that senior housing is likely to be the next target of baby-cam crimes.
It was my mother I visited, in Albany senior housing, day after day, as they moved her from a somewhat sheltered apartment overlooking green space to one whose windows offered line-of-sight access along a cross-street that ran close to our house. It was this apartment in which she powered her oxygen equipment within 15 feet from the rooftop air-conditioning systems in view of her windows, and within feet of interfering LED and neon lights. It was this building that was strung with Comcast set-top boxes and coaxial cable, with poorly secured WiFi and no Ethernet, with speaker-enabled landlines in public areas and assistants on breaks fingering smart phones always close by, and with intercom and emergency systems that could be and were all too easily monkey-wrenched from multiple locations including the parking garage and along the cross-street where houses continue to be turned over for development one by one.
This was the dwelling in which I tried to get her to let me move her oxygen equipment away from the window and give it a dedicated outlet. But she would not listen, not even when I read the usage instructions from the equipment manual. This was the apartment in which I told her that I was turning Bluetooth off on her phone because she wasn’t using it, without telling her that I sought to minimize her vulnerabilities. This was the place where I replaced the cheap stick Roku she got from somewhere with one less subject to interference and where I replaced “noisy” adapters she’d somehow come by with better.
It was from this apartment one night late last year that I heard the sound of an elderly woman on the other side of the thin wall from my mother’s oxygen machine ask someone: “What? You want me to leave?”
The first time my mother went to emergency, I got a message on my phone. The second time, I was left to close up her apartment. The room fell quiet when I shut off the oxygen equipment. The mobbers had taken that too.
