My assigned Probation Officer was an extraordinarily obese lady named Mary Ridgeway, who I thought found pleasure only in eating and in lashing out at the kids in her charge. Her phone stopped working one day; months later, I learned that after the phone company fixed her line, they told her they didn’t know why it had gone dead. She figured it must have been me and put a notation in my record that would become accepted as fact and used against me. Too many times in those days, unexplained failures in technology anywhere would be attributed to me.