The Final Day

This really needs to be a different kind of post for a very different kind of day. This is my last official day in the work force I joined when I was nine years old. That was the summer that Dad and I signed a contract for my lawn mowing services. Further employment is inevitably in my future in order to supplement my pension, but I will have some control over that by living within my means.

The morning started at 4:30 so that Mary and I could get our yoga in first thing. She prepared me a delicious and nutritious breakfast shake which I use to chase down my daily medication. These past six days we’ve enjoyed sharing the ride to and from work since we sent the Hyundai to Flagstaff with Rebecca. For the last time, I swiped by security badge at two entry points on my way to cubicle B110.


Ginny, my lead and someone I’ve worked with from the NOMADS conversion days, baked an “F/U Specialist” chocolate cake just for the occasion. There will be pictures, and perhaps somewhere along the line I’ll find the time to explain how I earned the designation. It promises to be a day full of those things of which memories are made, and I’m looking forward to it.

I’m not sure that it would be much different if a prisoner was being released. The spirit here is almost giddy with excitement over one of us escaping. It’s beginning to feel as though we’re producing “The DAFS Redemption”.

Yea! Liz gave me two postal verifications to enter. I can do this!

Rita and I just lapped the parking lot for the last time. Rita is another friend from the beginning of my time here. Only today did I learn that she’s a Tea Partier (she said any kind of party will do). I must have maintained my cover well because we’re parting as friends.

I am predictably being asked if I’m happy to be retiring, and my answer is an almost unqualified “yes”! The only misgiving I have is to leave so many of my coworkers in this untenable hell hole. I couldn’t have dictated a script as telling as the memorandum from the assistant district attorney at 4:54 pm yesterday entitled Performance & Professionlism [sic]. The entire division was broken down into “givers” and “takers”. This is consistent with the attitude toward DAFS employees from the day I started working here: employees are not the solution, they are the problem. Nevada ranks last in the civilized world for performance, and it has always been the attitude of administration and management that it’s because my coworkers and I just sit around doing nothing but expecting a paycheck. I’m tired of the demeaning and condescending attitude toward the people I work with because I know how hard they do work in an utterly dysfunctional environment. Two major studies of our division that have been conducted since I’ve been here have drawn the same conclusion. I wish that my colleagues could join me in a great escape that would leave our captains awash in the sea of uncertainty they have created.


Now it’s going to get weird. The Intake Unit of which I have been a part just gave me a very nice farewell. The food was delicious. The cards were funny and nostalgic. The gift card will be used to obtain something that will appropriately remind me of all the good people I’ve worked with here. But now, at 1:28 pm, with access to the operating system that I’ve worked with for the last decade taken away, I’m beginning to feel a little like a roach that’s been sprayed and is being watched to see how long it will take to die.

Two Days To Go

Here they are, Josh! This is the next-to-last day before I retire. It’s feeling a lot like high school graduation. I’m beginning to sense that same kind of freedom of knowing that time itself is not coming to an end, but that an era of subservient obedience is. I’m serious! Working at DAFS has been like going back to junior high, complete with a principal, vice principal and assorted counselors and advisers. I’ve shared with the various administrators I’ve worked under for the last 11 ½ years that when you treat people like children, they’re going to act like children. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was speaking to—at best—adolescents in adult bodies who understood themselves to be hall monitors charged with keeping the younger kids in line. The bittersweet truth is that little has changed about the management “philosophy” and style here, and I really feel as though I’m abandoning my coworkers as I manage to escape. Las Vegas is fundamentally immature by its very nature: naughty little boys and girls getting away with whatever they can. It is understandable, then, that the development of institutions and bureaucracies in this setting are also retarded. You can believe me that I have given hours of thought to my pastorate that failed here, wondering what I might have done differently. I have come to the same conclusion about my relationship with both the church and the county: I screwed up when I believed I was working with adults.

It's Quite Remarkable

To look at the 8/31 calendar entry: retire from Clark County; the very definition of surreal.

I've made recent mention of some of the television I've been watching, so it's about time to make mention of some of what I'm listening to. What inspired this little confession:
Source: http://www.sing365.com

Wooden Ships
------Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young)

by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Paul Kantner


Stills: If you smile at me, I will understand
'Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
in the same language.
Crosby: I can see by your coat, my friend,
you're from the other side,
There's just one thing I got to know,
Can you tell me please, who won?
Stills: Say, can I have some of your purple berries?
Crosby: Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now,
haven't got sick once.
Stills: Probably keep us both alive.

Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy,
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be,
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be,
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy...
Horror grips us as we watch you die,
All we can do is echo your anguished cries,
Stare as all human feelings die,
We are leaving - you don't need us.

Go, take your sister then, by the hand,
lead her away from this foreign land,
Far away, where we might laugh again,
We are leaving - you don't need us.

And it's a fair wind, blowin' warm,
Out of the south over my shoulder,
Guess I'll set a course and go...

Restoring Honor

I'm watching live on C-SPAN Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, DC. I cannot help but think of the thirty-second chapter of Genesis in that American patriotism is being idolized. Idolatry is as old as our species because of our need for concreteness to cope with incomprehensible abstraction. When we cannot grasp our inherent value as children of God, we attempt to justify it through the citation of accomplishments which we want to believe are consistent with the eternal order. We contribute our gold to the creation of a calf which tangibly represents the glorification of self and country because we are too impatient--and perhaps too lazy--to align ourselves in harmonious relationship with the Creator. The age old dilemma is still before us: do we honor ourselves or God?

Three Days To Go

I just returned from lunch with my girlfriends: Aracely, Liz and Rikki. These are the friendships I’m going to miss dearly after I retire. There’s a spirit of camaraderie among those of us in the trenches that is just not shared with those in the rarefied ranks of management and administration. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. I approached the assistant district attorney, the senior management analyst, and my unit administrator with a request that I might use them as references during the process of finding employment in Fort Collins. Here are the three responses I got (in the order received): “Most certainly, Mr. Hanna.” “I will have to review your most recent evaluation, look at your performance statistics and talk to your Supervisor. I will let [you] know.” “Okay.” Now, you can have some fun matching the response to the correct person. If you do it in the comments section, I will even tell you if you’re correct or not. Now that I think about it, I’m just going to give Aracely, Liz and Rikki as my references. Nobody knows a grunt better than another.

Four Days To Go

One week from today I will be retired. I’m wondering what I will do. First, I plan not to wake up at 4:30 AM (making such a plan will probably ensure that I do). Whenever I do wake up, I don’t plan to check the weather and traffic reports before going out the door. If I do go out the door, it may be to get a nice breakfast at Denny’s (I say this simply to irritate the rest of my family). I won’t read the newspaper because we haven’t taken it for years, and I’m not sure that I’ll be eager to go online until sometime midday. I won’t go fishing because I don’t fish. I won’t go golfing because I don’t golf. The truth of the matter is that my salvation is in our imminent relocation (voluntary, of course). The movers arrive on September 10 and so the first week-and-a-half of my retirement will be spent, I’m sure, on getting ready for them. I’m guessing that it will be—at least at first—like an extended vacation. It doesn’t seem possible right now, but I imagine that that day will come when I actually miss seeing the people I’ve worked with for the past 11+ years. I can also imagine that Mary is wondering what she’s going to do with me around all the time. She may go back to work.

Five Days To Go

I am hoping to leave the smallest footprint possible when I retire. By that I mean nothing leftover from my caseload for others to handle. Those who supervise, manage and otherwise administrate me have assisted me in this endeavor by allowing me to focus on my backlog. It’s looking very much (right now) as though I’ll have everything wrapped up one week from today. August 31 is indeed going to be a very interesting day. I am to return my ID badge, manuals, keys (not to worry, the only key I have is to my work area drawers), etc. In an attempt to be proactive I asked today whether there is a time of day that I’m supposed to do all this. The answer was: before you leave. The person who provided that response leaves at 4PM, the two people she referred me to leave at 5 PM, and it apparently is no concern that I leave at 6 PM. My ID badge gets me in and out of doors, allows access to the printers and copiers, and flatters me with a picture that’s about eight years old. Any way I look at it, there may be an hour or two next Tuesday during which I may not be able to go the restroom. Come to think of it, how appropriate that retirement day and Depends day might go hand in hand. I’m also supposed to check out with the IT desk. I’m kind of hoping for a Men in Black memory erasure so that I won’t have to remember any of this. Everyone tells me how happy they are that I am able to retire, but the air is green with envy. Can I really be properly retired by people who are secretly jealous? Stay tuned.

Six Days To Go

I arrived in Las Vegas full of enthusiasm for bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the city of sin. It seemed at the time like a challenge worthy of my calling. That calling today remains alive only inside my own head. I redirected that enthusiasm toward the creation of an ecumenical community of faith that would enjoin hearts and minds to a new relationship with their Creator through Christ. Today that vision remains only in my memory. One final time I redirected my enthusiasm toward child support enforcement only to learn that institutions ultimately end up preserving themselves by maintaining the status quo. Any thoughts I may have had about how to improve the process here remain mine alone. What one is supposed to do with unrealized aspirations is, I guess, what I am about to find out. Save Aunt Esther and her daughter, Dalene, the only family I’ll have in Fort Collins will be Mary, Rachel and Steve. The Rocky Mountain Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church was nonplussed when I informed it that I was returning as a native son. The Larimer County child support enforcement program informed me that I was not qualified for a position for which I applied that is similar to the one I hold now. It is hard to imagine beginning a new life with a lower profile than the one I bring to retirement. I’m hoping that this is a good thing; because neither can I imagine that I am ever going to be bothered by anyone else again.

On Becoming What We Hate

Religious fundamentalism is evil by any other name. It is not a philosophy or theology, it is sectarian ideology in religious garb. I'm sitting here on my day off watching MSNBC and wondering what's really going on in the country when incredible allegations are slanderously made about the President of the United States with apparent impunity. There is no comfort in saying I told you so, because the fact that I've been warning of the growth of this movement in our society for years now has been to no avail. Corporations bought the United States Government before the very eyes that were otherwise focused upon a beguiling "consumer theology". The future of ever greater consumption is definite, but a society infatuated with the notion of buying its way into heaven willingly ignores this truth in lieu of a gratifying but false belief system. I daresay that the Christian standing of anyone, any one, who questions the standing of another is immediately drawn into question. These accusers are most definitely not disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. They cannot defend themselves against that charge because they blaspheme the Son of God, the Son of Man, by perpetrating their evil supposedly in his name. Al Qaeda, Taliban, American Right: fundamentalism by any other name...

Seven Days To Go

The carrot at the end of the tunnel is getting closer. For those who don’t quite comprehend this esoteric concept I will have to refer you to my sister who turned fifty-six yesterday. Kim has always had a unique worldview which is in touch with reality, but just barely. Seen through her eyes, everything takes on a peculiar twist including her belief that I’ve been a good brother. I’m not saying that I’ve been a bad brother, but I don’t recall anything about our growing up that would distinguish me from average. The primary reason for moving is to get the heck out of Las Vegas and be nearer to family. Mary’s folks are in eastern Nebraska, Mom and Kim and her family are in Billings, and Dad is in Littleton. Everyone will be within a day’s drive. The short sale we offered the Bank of America has not yet been declined. Rebecca is going to take the Hyundai to Flagstaff with her this weekend. The pieces are slowly but surely coming together. I’m looking forward to having all of the family nearby, even if it means that I’ll have to greet them from Walmart.

Eight Days To Go

Some days are better than others. This is what I am discovering to be true of my health. Gleevec has many possible side effects and I am very fortunate that mine are relatively mild. This is simply to say that I only made it to lunch time at work today before I realized that it was time to go home. These episodes are for some reason becoming more frequent which is fatiguing. I can tell that I am more easily distracted from the detail of my work and that has been my rationale for making liberal use in recent months of my sick time. Hey! Bank of America! That medical hardship I wrote you about wasn’t just bullshit! Let me retire in peace (God knows enough of my tax dollars went toward bailing you out to cover the upside down mortgage your industry imposed on us)! That’ll do, Pig.

Nine Days To Go

I’m feeling like a kid again. Why the end of fourth grade stands out so clearly in my mind, I don’t know. It may have had something to do with an overnight at Dean Bernard’s house on the last day of school. The sky was brilliant blue. The temperature was perfect. And I was free of the classroom for the next three months. The giddiness of graduating high school was similar, but by then I knew that college was waiting at the other end of summer. In nine days, I’m going to walk away from this oppressive place. That sounds ungrateful, I know, but the past eleven-and-a-half years have not been the happiest of my life. At every other occupation of my storied career I was basically treated as an adult. Positions of responsibility—field underwriter, peace officer, pastor—naturally accepted the degree of one’s maturity necessary to do the job. But here at DAFS, as I told the Assistant D.A. who immediately preceded the current one, it’s just one big junior high. There have been repeated lectures on dress code. Upper management rules by fear, imposing quotas and frequently flying the “termination” flag high if you fail to meet them. I’m really surprised that I don’t need a hall pass to go to the men’s room (although I think our movements are carefully monitored by those brown-noses who themselves hope to be in management some day). We clock in, work noiselessly in our cubicles, and then clock out. In nine more days I’m going to walk from this place, and I may even flip a California howdy to the surveillance camera.

Ten Days To Go

On the tenth day remaining until retirement I find myself immersed in the accumulation of problematic cases that I didn’t have time for before now. My attempts to enlist help to assist me in solving these problems isn’t turning out to be any more successful than the first time I asked. Those problems that I am unable to resolve by August 31 will become someone else’s, and so it goes. I have found it peculiar that my employer weighs all cases equally. Common sense tells you that this is absurd. But the draconian regime requiring minimum quotas (ask yourself, did it ever make you feel better to hear that law enforcement officers had a minimum number of traffic citations to issue per month?) will be something that my coworkers who remain will have to deal with. I’ve long thought that an iota of humility would do this organization a world of good, but the alpha mentality which claws its way to the top leaving no survivors may very well be incapable of such emotion. Oh, well! It’s soon not to be my problem anymore.

The Good, The Bad, and ...

Wherever you go, there are good people and not-such-good people. This is one of the things I’ve learned while living in Las Vegas. Little did we know how prophetic it was when Mom and I went to see Martin Scorsese’s Casino just months before it became known that I was to be appointed to a church in Las Vegas that summer of 1996. I’ll confess to an infatuation with stars like Sharon Stone and Elisabeth Shue, and I let that influence my imagination of what we would find here. I think the only real celebrity I’ve seen in the fourteen years we’ve been here is Matt Damon, and that was the result of being moved to first-class to get me away from a drunken and unruly passenger. Who I have met in the time we’ve been here are people who are remarkably like you and me, people who work, raise families, aspire to success and despair at failure. That’s because, for the most part, I tend to hang out with good people and to avoid the not-such-good ones. It may seem that the latter are more prevalent in Las Vegas, but from what little I know about it they come here from around the globe. It’s the yin and the yang, there are good and bad people everywhere. I do not doubt that the lure of Sin City is strong to those bent on evil, but their ilk is not exclusively the city’s population. I am grateful for the many good acquaintances I’ve made here, grateful for having successfully avoided most of the bad ones (with the exception of those I had the misfortune of being subjected to through Trinity UMC), and am looking forward to meeting the many more good people that I’m sure are in my future.

Of More Last Things

I continue to experience things for the last time. Yesterday was probably the last scheduled meeting of our unit that I will attend, although there’s always the possibility of hastily called gatherings to deal with one crisis or another. I saw it as an opportunity to—one last time—offer my opinions, formed by over six years of assessing intake cases, for how the process might be streamlined. As my regular readers well know, I am painfully slow to catch on to the reality of circumstances. There is no one here, at least at the administrative and management levels, who are in the least bit interested in what the grunts think. The assistant director recently released our performance measures. I was a little surprised, frankly, because any improvement over the previous year was marginal at best, perhaps a percentage point or two better. In all fairness, it was enough to raise our ranking from 52nd in the nation to 49th. But the notion is still firmly ingrained in this organization that policy and procedure must be developed by people who don’t have a clue how to do what must be done. In our latest reorganization, people were appointed to administrate and manage an intake process that none of them could do themselves if put in a room full of applications and left alone. National rankings and statistics prove that government in Nevada is plagued by precisely this phenomenon, and for as long as those people remain in power it is hard to figure out how they will ever get better. So why, you may ask me, knowing all this did you foolhardily open your mouth? That’s a very good question.

The End Is Near

We have but five weekends left in Las Vegas, including the one during which we will actually move. I continue to be grateful for our high miles-per-gallon Prius that allows us to cruise around town without feeling too terribly guilty. That’s just exactly what we did yesterday. What I’m sure will turn out to be our last visit to the little town of Blue Diamond was made all the more memorable by the discovery of donkeys grazing almost everywhere, including the ball field (we didn’t see any asses until we got back to Las Vegas). I have developed a deep appreciation of the desert environment and its cultivation of an almost supernatural will to live on the parts of plants and animals who survive this extreme environment. The desert has its own unique beauty and I’m glad that I’ve had a chance to learn more about it. I can’t really think of any reason—at least right now—that I would ever return to Sin City after we move. Maybe one will present itself before we leave.

A Life Wasted?

The first three cases I worked this morning all involved the same mother of four children by three men (I guess she liked the one guy enough to let him impregnate her twice). She’s the same age as Rebecca and claimed to know nothing more about the fathers of her children (ranging in age from two to nine) than their names. Through the research that is what I do to earn a living, I was able to come up with at least nominal identifying information on two of the guys, leaving number three (yeah, you guessed it, he’s the father of two) as a complete mystery. Our division has an entire unit dedicated to nothing more than trying to locate unidentified non-custodial parents. The remaining three cases I assessed before lunch didn’t get any better: infants born to child mothers with no idea who the father is. This is what I’ve been doing for the last eleven-and-a-half years, and quite frankly, I’m looking forward to retirement. Six years as a cop, fifteen as a preacher, time served as a child support enforcement agent, and, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t meant a damned thing. There’s still crime, sin, and more little bastards running around than you can shake a stick at. I was raised to believe that life has meaning and a purpose. At this point, I’d like to know what that is.

Why?

I was raised to believe that life has meaning and purpose. I now recognize that for what it is: a belief. I suppose the argument with science is that in its objective empiricism it cannot prove or disprove subjective beliefs. Science can, and has, proved certain beliefs wrong, incorrect. There’s no devil dwelling in Earth’s basement and there is no Jehovah seated on a throne overlooking a geocentric plane traveling upon a turtle’s back. These are the fragile beliefs that the scientific method shatters into irreparable pieces. But as a student of the behavioral sciences, I am aware that there are also more substantial beliefs that science hardly puts a dent in. While the fundamental question of science is how, that fundamental question of theology is why. Why am I here? Why was I born to die? Science has developed answers to how I got here and how I’m going to die, but it is no closer to answering why these things happen than religion and philosophy have come since the dawn of human thought. My impending retirement has brought into sharper focus these questions which have been with me for a lifetime. What has been the meaning of this life I lived until now? Has there been any purpose to my life? Such reflection is inevitable, I think, as one reviews years spent at many different occupations in an effort to fulfill a vocation. I’ve done some things well. There have been many things I could have done better. I’ve spent six decades on this planet and still find myself wondering why.

Easy Come, Easy Go

The buyers with whom we signed a contract little more than two weeks ago have withdrawn, and so it’s back to square one. In the current Las Vegas market one can’t even give a house away. In addition to being disappointing, it’s demoralizing to have such a major investment devalued to practically nothing. In my July 21, 2008 post, I pondered the susceptibility of Las Vegas to the impending financial crisis. Now, with two years hindsight, I can attest to the fact that Sin City was not immune. Leading the nation in unemployment and home foreclosures, Las Vegas is suffering from Wall Street's gambling as much as any place. Imagine, corporate evil actually turns on itself. I have learned many things since moving here fourteen years ago, not the least of which is that greed does not care who gets hurt—even if it means those who have faithfully nurtured it.

A Little Less Complaining, Please

I’m learning that a conundrum associated with my disease is that, even though I don’t feel especially good at times, my numbers continue to be. In all fairness, then, I must follow-up my complaint with the report I received from my oncologist last Friday that my blood counts show my CML to be in remission. This is, of course, great news! It’s just that I’m left with no reason to, at times, feel like crap. So, I am committing myself to 18 days of perfect attendance at work until I retire on the 31st. As long as I can drive myself here and back, I will be physically present (although I can make no promises about my mental state). I am deeply grateful for the medical technology that is allowing me to live longer on borrowed time, and I will welcome whatever psychological innovation may come along which will help to reduce my complaining.