You Can't Quit, You're Fired

 Welp, it looks like I get to start enjoying retired life a little earlier than I expected.

If you’ll recall a post from three weeks ago, I informed my company that I’d retire rather than be forced back into the office, as their firm-wide commandment just commanded. I gave them 9/2 at the effective date, which was the first day we were supposed to return to the office.

Since then, I’ve been spending an hour a day training my replacement, which is woefully inadequate. There were some things I was able to cover once before moving on, but in a better world, that should be followed up with them performing the same task with me watching, and then totally solo. That takes time, though. All we had time for was one and done.

So, last Wednesday, when I logged into my weekly one-on-one with the boss, she had an HR person with her, which is never a good sign. Without fanfare, she let me know there was a departmental reorganization afoot and my position had been eliminated. Eight days before I was to retire. Then she said I’d get a severance package equal to 29 weeks’ pay. (Two weeks plus one week for every year I’ve been there.) THAT got my attention. At that point, I missed pretty much everything the HR lady was saying because I was trying to wrap my head around why they would give me a package when I was about to walk away voluntarily, with nothing. I didn’t believe that shit about a reorg at all. It sounded like they were afraid I was going to send my remaining days sabotaging the company from within, which was totally untrue. I’d been doing my best to train my replacement, keep up with my responsibilities, and clean out the electronic detritus amassed over 27 years… old saved emails, cartoons, awards, etc.

I had a couple of Goodbye emails already written, which were meant for various groups of people, but they warned me that following this conversation, I was to log off company systems immediately and never log on again. Not wanting to mess with the severance, I did just that, but was unhappy about it. I had some nice stuff I wanted to say. It wasn’t going to be a flaming farewell at all.

So, with that, I logged off, wondering WTF I was going to do with the rest of my day. I texted Sweetpea, of course, who I know wouldn’t see the email until later in the day, and then my brother, who had recently been “unwillfully retired” about a month earlier. I notified a couple of people within the company I was friendly with and whose contact info I had, then had lunch and a nap. (Retired life: so far, so good.)

Later that evening, I heard from one of those friends, who told me there actually was a reorg going on in my former silo. They cut loose a whole department of people, with plans to outsource their responsibilities. She said they probably had my name on their list for at least a month. She said they probably figured that if they laid off a bunch of people and gave severance, but let me walk away with nothing, it was grounds for a possible lawsuit. I don’t know about that, but I guess it’s possible.

But NOW it all made a lot more sense. All this time I thought I had them over a barrel, they were thinking, “Dude, don’t be a dumbass, just stay put for a few more days, and we’ll send you off with a chunk of cash!” I also figure that they’re getting rid of my whole area of responsibility, which is why they didn’t care how trained the next guy was. They must have determined they could live with short-term pain and shed the whole operation.

I thought back to my termination call and realized that my firing must have been the easiest and most pleasant one of the day. Once I realized I was getting severance, I practically tap-danced out the proverbial door. If this had happened at a time when I wasn’t ready and able to retire, I would have been devastated and pissed beyond belief. I’m guessing some of their other calls were more like that.

So, now I have to figure out how to be retired. I’m going to need some kind of new routine, lest I wander about all day wondering what to do next. I plan on expanding on that with future posts, probably starting next week.

I can foresee right now, though, that it will be a noisy couple of weeks. We had just signed a contract to remodel our kitchen and bath the night before I learned about the Great Office Repopulation, and work is starting this Wednesday. We could have canceled it within the period of rescission, but there really wasn’t an upside to doing so. We need the job done regardless, and delaying it wasn’t going to change anything, other than it would likely be more expensive. So, onward ho!

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

That big drama playing out now, aside from wondering if TFG gave Alaska back to Russia, is whether Texas will forcibly extract five new Republican districts via gerrymandering even more severely than they already have. The president asked for it, so the Big Bad Tough-guy Texans immediately rolled over and began rigging our government even further in their favor. Texas Democrats went on the lam, which sounds like chickenshit but is, in fact, the most effective thing they can do, given their minority status. Their best chance is to deprive the process of the minimum number of participants to hold a legal session (aka, deny a quorum).

The problem there is that they can’t run forever, and eventually, Texas will either reel them in or change the law to allow further business to take place without the runaway legislators. It’s not like it will be hard to find a sympathetic judge in the area. So if they’re as determined to prop up the Cheeto in Chief as I think they are, this is going to happen. The question is what to do next.

Ben Sargent, TexasObserver.org

This is where Governor Gavin Newsom of California strode into the fray and declared that if Texas pulled such a stunt, his state would too, thereby nullifying the new advantage. I know that there are some in the Hell Yeah camp, and others in the Don’t Stoop to Their Level camp, because we don’t know where it will all end.

For the record, I hate gerrymandering. If it were up to me, every state would be required to appoint a bipartisan panel in charge of creating a district map that’s logical for geographic reasons, with an outcome that’s consistent with the state’s political makeup. In other words, you can’t do what Wisconsin and North Carolina did and produce a map that creates a majority of Republican representatives in a state with a majority of Democratic voters.

My state of Maryland is one of the few states that’s heavily gerrymandered Democratic. We only have one Republican representative, the noxious Andy Harris, whose district is made up of the entire eastern shore. The current map was actually put to a referendum a few years back, and passed easily.

And I voted for it as well, because while I’m against gerrymandering in general, I’m even more against being a sucker and letting Republicans pull every trick in the book to amass and consolidate power that will last for generations, while we righteously take the moral high ground straight to a permanent minority status. I say, if they stop their gerrymandering, we’ll stop ours. And the same goes in California.

I don’t want this to happen, and every effort should be made to stop them in Texas. I just don’t see how that will be done, not with the field tilted so far in their favor to begin with, and the ultimate backstopping of the current SCOTUS, who blessed such gerrymandered atrocities in the first place. So the only alternative is to fight fire with fire. I want Democrats to actually put up a fight and DO something. Use what power they have without shame, just like the GOP does. They never apologize, they don’t care if something is “unpopular,” (in which case they go on Fox “News’ and MAKE it popular) so it if helps get them the power they want, whether it’s putting a hold on an opponent’s Supreme Court seat, or expediting one of their own in the same situation, they just do it. All the critics eventually forget about it and move on to the next week’s outrage.

Meanwhile, they come out of it with a much stronger position. To them, everything is fair game in the pursuit of power. In fact, it’s not only fair game to them, it’s God’s will.

I’d like to see the Democrats borrow a little bit of that chutzpah and play some hardball themselves. I’m tired of being the noble but losing warriors fighting the good fight. If we don’t step up our game, the fight will soon be over, and we’ll be locked out of the ring for the foreseeable future and then some.

Republicans are working to cement themselves into the only positions of power. Once they do, politics will no longer matter because they won’t need to curry our favor. They’ll be running the country forever, and we’ll be the commodity they buy, use up, wring out, and dispose of. Our elections will have the same certainty about them as Russia’s do.

And the counter-gerrymandering may not work anyway… Remember that SCOTUS can no doubt find a way to rule that Texas’s map is legal, but the other blue ones aren’t. It’s not like they have any consistency of standards, other than “Whatever Republicans want.”

I hate the gerrymandering too. But we at least have to slow them down. While the reliably blue state of Maryland may have to sit this one out, because there’s only one seat to be gained, no matter how they draw the maps, it will be up to California, Illinois, and New York to hold the wall against the MAGA horde. I will support their efforts and hope that it can all be reeled back in later, once cooler heads appear on the horizon.

Retirement clock: 10 days and counting…

Compare & Contrast

Since my days at work are numbered now (and today that number was 15), I’ve been going through all the non-business electronic files I had on my slice of the company's shared drive. While everything got deleted, there was some stuff I emailed home for various reasons, and this was one of the items, which I hadn’t looked at in over 18 years. (This Word doc is so old it still has blue font.)

In April of 2007, I started compiling data for a prospective blog post (2 years before I even started this blog). I wanted to be sure I didn’t forget how big a clown the current president was, nor the evil he was conducting.

Little did I know that one day there would be another president who would make this guy look like Winston Churchill. Still, it’s interesting to see the similarities. The principles are similar, with the differences being a matter of intensity. In other words, they’re doing the same kind of things today, only worse and more obvious.

So with that, I give you this look at a time-capsule item from 2007:

 Reasons to Loathe George W. Bush

(not including the Iraq War) 

• Firing US Attorneys for political gains / politicizing the Justice Dept.  Includes an item allowing “emergency” appointments via the Patriot Act, as to end-run Senate confirmations. (TFG upped this from installing party hacks to hacks loyal to him.) 

• K Street Project- turning the Lobbying Industry into yet another arm of the Republican Party. (In addition to the Oil, Gas, Auto, Coal, Nuclear Power, Banking, Insurance, Pharmaceuticals, and Tobacco industries, et al.) 

• Ignoring the problems at Walter Reed (and problems with Vet Care in general) until it actually got some publicity. (New philosophy: Who needs Vet care? 

• Further politicizing the Justice Dept by running out anyone involved with/ Civil Rights Dept, and filling the spots with/ inexperienced cronies and hacks. (Same here, only more so. They’re running minorities and women out of the government and military.) 

• The obscene sweetheart deals that were made to benefit Halliburton. The Iraq War alone houses enough shocking, greed-encrusted deals to make even a Trump disciple blush. Worst of all, the actual troops can’t get sufficient body armor, armored HumVees, or even the minimum levels of training. (Now the deals all sweeten the president himself. The big corporations will have to make do on their massive tax cuts and leave it at that.) 

• Catchy-named initiatives that actually undermine what the name infers, like: 

• Clear Skies Initiative which was written by the oil and coal lobbies, which weakened controls on toxic emissions.
• No Child Left Behind, that creates mandated standards, but provides no dollars to pay for them.
• Death Tax, which is tearfully held up as an unfair burden to these unfortunate families in their time of need. What no one mentions is that estates are only taxed when they total over 2 million dollars, so that rich fucks can leave their fortunes to their spoiled rich-fuck kids. These are exactly the people who should be picking up the tax bill so that there can be Head Start and After School Care programs. While the “Death Tax” may be technically accurate, the “Rich Fuck” tax would be a name that’s much more in line with the spirit of the thing. 

• The Valerie Plame leak, which just shows that not only did no one in office care that they were outing a covert CIA agent as a form of political payback, but they didn't even care if they got caught. Along with the US Attorney thing, it's just another example of the Changing Story Scenario. (also see “Reasons for the Iraq War”)  The basic premise is “Yeah, we’re lying… so what are you gonna do about it?” (Personal payback for disloyalty. Sounds familiar…)

 

• Scientists being overruled on scientific matters by conservative policy hacks.  See Plan-B birth control, HPV vaccinations, “intelligent design,” and anything on global warming. Also see the appointment as manager of the administration’s federal family planning initiatives, of a guy who opposes birth control in favor of an “abstinence only” approach. On the bright side, said guy apparently resigned last week. (Now we have wholesale elimination of any department that might cost big business a few bucks by doing its job, plus the Dept of Education, without which, future president-criminals will have an even easier time getting away with the grift. And any scientist who doesn’t produce the government-desired result becomes an unemployed receptacle for death threats.) 

• The appearance of gay marriage issues (or other social hot-button issues) that predictably surface during election season as so to scare up support from the far right, only to disappear immediately upon completion of the election. (There’s always a Boogieman they use to scare you, whether it’s gays, groomers, or gang members.) 

• The unprecedented power grab by the executive branch, aided by the Republican Congress enablers. (I don’t remember what this one was about, but we sure have that now, as Congress willingly gives up any spending supervision, taking the much easier stance of “Whatever Trump wants.”) 

• The unprecedented secrecy of this administration has generated more classified documents than any president ever, including existing documents already in the public domain. (The current Administration would love to maintain that kind of secrecy, but they’re just not smart enough to keep their nefarious plans off of WhatsApp.) 

• The merging of religion with government. See Faith-Based Initiatives, or in other words, paying churches to administer to the poor, while spreading the “Good Word.” By the way, only Christian Organizations need apply. (The president doesn’t give a crap about this stuff but his handlers and donors do, plus his enablers in the Supreme Court.) 

• Cloaking voting restrictions targeted at minority, low-income, and elderly people (read “Likely Democratic Voters”) by calling it Protecting Against Voter Fraud.  While at the same time championing paperless voting machines manufactured by Diebold Inc., whose chairman declared in 2004 that he was going to do everything in his power to see that Ohio's electoral votes were delivered to Bush. On the bright side, this schmo also resigned in scandal, although a tad too late to do us any good. The voting irregularities in Ohio alone should have grounds for a national recount of every tight race.  It was Joseph Stalin that said, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” (Has not changed a bit. They know they don’t have a winning hand, so they’re working furiously to rig the next game with gerrymandering and attacks on the voting process. They will do literally anything to remain in power.) 

• The FBI using Patriot Act powers on pretty much whatever they want. And not just the ones from a couple weeks ago, it’s been going on for some time. (The current ICE Gestapo doesn’t need to rely on any Act, just the say-so from Hair Fuhrer.)

 I guess I ran out of enthusiasm before we even got to Hurricane Katrina.

So Much for Easing Off Into the Sunset

Early last month, I wrote a post about my hopes and dreams for retirement, which is that I can finally take it easy and do things that I want to do. Of course, my time frame was about two years down the road. Looks like that’s not happening.

Remember when I wrote about telling my boss my feelings about a prospective forced return to work? It’s not prospective anymore. They want us back in three days per week, starting right after Labor Day. Months ago, I heard it would happen when my company moves to a new building in January. But last week, my boss said the directive would be early September instead. I hoped there would be some kind of appeal process or other wiggle room to negotiate because I have no intention of complying.

Well, the memo came out yesterday and there was zero wiggle room. It’s happening to everyone, even those who don’t live near our offices. (I have no idea how that’s going to work.) It came from our CEO and contained lots of happy talk about enhanced collaboration and teamwork. They’re offering us two more personal days too, and two weeks in the summer when we can work from anywhere (just like I can right now).

As I mentioned before, I’m the only one who does what I do. If I were to disappear, they would be truly fucked. There are complicated processes and details surrounding my world. I have some self-written procedures, which I may or may not share. Without my guidance, no one would have the slightest idea what to do.

My first instinct was to nuke the whole thing from orbit, but after conferring with my brother, he convinced me I should offer the 90 days the company wants before retiring, on the condition that I do that time at home. He said I’d regret going out in a bad way. And if they don’t go along, I can retire effective the day after Labor Day, the first day we’d have to go in.

So I spoke to my boss this morning, and as I suspected, this is a universal edict. Even knowing the barrel I have them over, they would not let me run out my time training my replacement at home. So, I told her I’d be retiring on September 2^nd. I didn’t yell, didn’t get pissed, and just remained calm and resolute. I could see the panic set in as she realized that I couldn’t possibly train anyone fully in only 18 days, without devoting eight hours a day to it. And if I did that, all my real-time duties would remain undone. It’s not like I’m going to kill myself accommodating them, not after robbing me of two years’ work.

Yes, I know I could just go in, but I don’t see it that way. I feel like they changed the deal. They gave me 100% work-from-home status for the last five years, and my life is fully adapted to that. Going into the office again, with the 90-minute round-trip commute, lack of lunch options, and having to work in the middle of an open-walled circus, is not my idea of fun.

My dad always said he’d work as long as he enjoyed it and his boss didn’t bug him. I’ve been using that as my guide all along. I’m lucky that I have the option to retire. In fact, I told the boss this morning that if this had happened 10 years ago, “yes, I’d go into the office, but I’d be resentful and probably do a half-assed job.” All positive feelings about my work and the place would be gone; just as gone as the likelihood I’d ever take a call or answer an email after hours, like I do now.

She wanted me to talk to an HR guy and gave me his name, so I could “ask questions and learn about the process,” and I emailed him immediately. He never responded, which was not a surprise. I do want to hear what they have to say before I do anything irreversible, which is the only reason I didn’t submit my plans today. I wonder how many people are doing the same. Maybe I’m an outlier, maybe I’m part of an open rebellion. And maybe cooler heads will prevail, and accommodations will be made.

However, until then, my next task is to determine the maximum pressure my printer/scanner can withstand when I sit on the glass, to create my resignation letter.