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Here it is, you see: It is now March 31,2023, and exactly six years ago, which was March 31, 2017, was my last day as a full time employee. (Someone, somewhere, had dropped a ball in some way, and my task order was not going to be renewed for “about three weeks”.) All right, then, so it was going to be a short time for retirement practice, as I was at the time 65 years old.
My company was kind to me, and encouraged (required) me to apply for Family and Medical Leave Act protection to keep my job alive. I was able to get that FMLA protection by the help of (oddly, a chiropractor rather than my so-called primary physician, the pill-pusher), but after the 12 meetings with the Christian psychologist and so forth, my employer no longer wanted me on the job, as I was far too weakened by things at that point in time. Eventually that employer asked me to undertake a new job (“part-time on-call”) to handle certain arrangements between our on-site position and the local office, to which I readily and happily agreed. (I would no longer be a systems analyst or system administrator, but in fact a “security assistant”, a job I certainly could do, as it required nothing more than common sense applied to a “security plan”.) As mentioned, the company was kind to me: they never reduced my hourly pay during the upcoming time. A security assistant does not earn the same salary as a systems analyst!
So things went on, and things got handled, efficiently and effectively is my hope. For a time. I was able to help the company move to a new facility, which of course required a new facility security clearance to be approved. I was given the task of collecting and writing the periodic reports of subcontractors, and submitting them to the company, a job I was happy to do and apparently able to perform. Then it all ended.
The company human resources officer called on January 20, 2020, to tell me that the company would never bid for another contract requiring my particular skill set, and that, therefore, as of that day, I would be retired. (I did not mention that “never” is a big old word, and rarely well-defined, but I’m still waiting for that officer to get the idea…)
Okay, that’s the way it went. My income is only Social Security now, but I’d guess it is all right, since it has to be. I’m not exactly complaining, you see. But it leaves the question that is part of the title of this piece, “What am I?”
Yes, but “What am I?” by Dennis Glover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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