Every So Often …

Every so often, something happens here behind the lines that turns things about from what experience suggests is the norm.  Leaving a job but not moving directly to another one is normally distressing.  But if one makes it to retirement, there is a turnabout.  Leaving in those circumstances does not lead to distress in the same way as a termination in prior years would have done.  Quite the contrary.  The words that come to mind are from the Negro Spiritual quoted by Dr. Martin Luther King: Free at last; Free at last. Thank God Almighty I am Free at last!

Today I officially enter retirement.  Having been on terminal leave for over a month, as of today I no longer report time to my former employer.  They can no longer exert pressure of any kind on me to refrain from doing anything that might call into question the accuracy of the picture they seek to project to the public.  No longer must I endure their lying to me, and lying about me.  No longer must I spend my days in an environment where it is blatantly clear that truth is to be taken as a synonym for plausible denial, and integrity is an indictable offense.  If that all sounds exaggerated, consider:  I worked in a place where an anonymous email was used by an executive to launch a full scale, formal investigation of a manager who had been targeted for attention by this individual and the previous incumbent.  All the while, we were inundated with propaganda to assure us that we worked in a place where people mattered.  It led to a grievance, and the adjudicator was moved to comment:

Had I been able to decide this case on the merits, I would have had serious reservations as to what weight, if any, to place on the anonymous emails or on [the executive’s] opinions, as these were advanced in the form of hearsay and the grievors had no opportunity to challenge the issue of whether the comments they had made were capable of being offensive or unwelcome.

This is no aberration, something that the organization would consider unacceptable in relation to its norms.  The proof of that is that the executive in question has since been promoted, twice.

I am looking forward to a Happy New Year.  I hope everyone has one as well.  I have no intention of being preoccupied by that from which I have been freed.  If I decide to take a trip, it will most definitely not be one through a sewer in a glass bottom boat, and that would be what a rehash of the moral bankruptcy of my former workplace would amount to.  However, from time to time, my experiences there will no doubt provide vivid material for examples of what passes for morality in our Canadian society today to use in my writing.  Since there is now neither incentive nor obligation to refrain from anything that may cast the source of my paycheck in a bad light, I will not hesitate to do so where it is appropriate to cite their example.  After all, one must never neglect the value of a bad example.

 

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