Today I would have celebrated my 26th anniversary with the government, after spending nine years in police work and four years in restaurant work. I was looking forward to working for a few more years yet for my agency because I was good at what I did and I freely and unselfishly imparted my expertise and wisdom to amenable younger lawyers, many of whom were eager to learn, grateful and are now lifelong friends.
But that's not suitable for the current breed of cut-throat managers. They advance upon your work, demand that you do more with less because it reflects well upon them and their advancement, and they actively work to drive sexagenarians out of the work force (improperly if not illegally) because the older workers don't worship these less experienced managers and can see through their shenanigans and thus make them extremely uncomfortable.
Things changed three or four years ago when the current set of managers in my former shop became a closed system of friends and cronies who looked out only for themselves, could do no wrong, and started going after older workers by giving them sub-standard reviews, usually based upon writing discrepancies from their own perfect writing (you don't write exactly like I would and you're not in my circle of worshippers therefore you're downgraded on this extremely subjective application of a supposedly objective category). A brand new manager named Chris, who did one case all his career there, became management's hatchet man, in my opinion, and he drove a fellow sexagenarian out of the division with bullying management, manifested in an outrageous, bogus out-of-proper-channels written review and perpetrating a stalking incident in retaliation when she fought back.
Then he set his sights on me as the next sexagenarian to go, by establishing an outrageous set of ridiculous pre textual deadlines of unimportant matters when real work was being done and needed to be done, as I informed him, and now we're both suddenly gone. I left by premature retirement to escape an untenable hostile work environment based upon age discrimination by the agency, leaving behind a retaliation claim to go with my then-current formal ageism discrimination complaint, based upon Chris's bullying, ham handed and incompetent management style culminating in a list of pre textual demands upon me. He himself left suddenly and unexpectedly two weeks later, obviously, in my opinion, having been told to look elsewhere as his rise through the ranks of management was stymied because his actions were drawing too much heat upon the current closed circle of managers.
