On the one hand, I was back at work. But, on the other hand, I was cleaning out my workspace for retirement. It seems that whoever had been borrowing my desk had also been caring for a displaced dog but unfortunately this person was not completely familiar with a dog's need to be taken outside regularly. I thought about leaving some advice on this topic but I didn't know who this dog sitter was and management of the group was about to be in flux again, so who would I leave advice with? Better to just clean up the waste and get on with retirement.
Back on that first hand, I had been falsely accused on financial misconduct, given involuntary leave, and threatened with reprisals. On the better hand, that was all over with, I was reinstated, management had more or less apologized to the extent that management is able to apologize, and instead of being categorized as a moral pariah I was tasked with providing leadership and example to members of the department in my last months of employment.
The situation couldn't have been more twisted if it had been actual reality although of course it was hardly that.
The most puzzling turnabout was that my supervisor arranged for me to be given the rank of captain. That was odd because no part of my previous career involved ranked service. It was as if an uncommissioned employee of the U.S. Public Health Service was transferred directly into a supervisory position of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps for the final few months of a career.
Except that a captaincy here seemed to be more equivalent to that rank in a police department than to a Coast Guard command. In fact, the captaincy came with a badge which was in a box in the desk I was now cleaning out. I thought I would take the badge with me; I thought I wanted to take it with me and I also thought it would be insulting to leave it behind.
The appearance of this badge reminded me of the Captain's badge of the school Safety Patrol which I wore in actual reality for a month during sixth grade.
It occurred to me that I should add the rank of captain to my resumé as a memorial of my time with the organization. I thought too that for the rest of my life I could add "Captain (retired)" to my signature. It might be a deceptive claim to distinction, depending on where I used the style, but then again it might be fun.
In the light of day I have even more mixed feelings about this tale. Would I really want to claim the commission from an agency which had months earlier been happy to railroad me? Would this rank and badge be more significant than the one from sixth grade even supposing it to have the same reality as the earlier one? Or was the imagined commission simply an expression of corporate theater? If the rank was theater then claiming the rank would be merely acting in a play.
In the light of day I think that even if the whole story had been true it would be better to play the actual reality game directly rather than mediated through the stage play directed by a former employer.
Still it is a little bit sad to exclude even imagining holding onto a captaincy and the small and fleeting honor the rank implies. To be human implies the desire to stand higher and the offer of a step stool is always tantalizing.