Page 2 of 5 of the Settlement Agreement

Page 2 of the 5-page settlement is below. It is mostly a recitation of the purposes and effects of the stipulated Settlement Agreement entered by the ALJ on or around September 20, 2017, settling the matter which had its genesis in the improperly low evaluation I received on August 26, 2015, which I believed was fatally flawed due to age discrimination. The matter was concluded via settlement over two years later but by then I was out of my job of 25 years due to my involuntary retirement because of what I considered to be a hostile work environment, exemplified by the bogus evaluation I received and marked by the retaliation that I suffered, in my opinion, in May 2016.

The legacy I left behind when I was involuntarily retired in 2016 after more than a quarter century of dedicated and outstanding work in government service, which included two trials, both won, much litigation involving frequent travel, and selfless passing on of my expertise to those who came after me, just like my two mentors, Steve and Dave, had passed on to me their wisdom and experience, was a final rating of Satisfactory. Sad.

Below is a closer look at the top of page 2 of the Settlement. The matter was investigated for another six months based upon my allegations of retaliation. A few short weeks after I left involuntarily, the manager who in my opinion had done what I considered to be retaliation left my former agency suddenly and unexpectedly. Hmmm. Following my departure in May, during the summer of 2016 I received a call from the HR office in which it was discussed with me that I could receive a Commendable, or possibly even an Outstanding, rating if I withdrew my complaint. I said that things had changed because now I was out of a job. The caller concluded by saying that he would put down (in his notes I guess) that I was unwilling to discuss settlement. I replied that that was incorrect, I was happy to discuss settlement but the situation had changed, an appropriate rating would be insufficient now and there was a problem at my former agency that I hoped to address in any settlement. That was the last I heard from my former agency about any potential settlement for almost a year.

Below is a closer look at the bottom of page 2. In late November 2016, I received two boxes of reports and exhibits, the result of the HR office's investigation into my case. Many people were interviewed, myself included, and offered sworn testimony. Now I had a choice of submitting the report to the Director of my former agency's HR office for a resolution, or to submit it to the regional office of the EEOC to initiate an Administrative Law case, which could be a de novo review with further discovery and  extended litigation. Based in part upon my less-than-confidence-building interaction with the Director that I mentioned earlier, I chose the latter option and filed the case in court on December 27, 2016. Nine more months of silence from the court concerning my case followed, except that as related previously, I established contact with my former agency's GC's office in May 2017 and meaningful settlement discussions finally started, nineteen months after the occurrence that started the case actually happened, my improperly low evaluation.

Page one of five of the Settlement Agreement

A lot happened during the two years between my sub-standard personnel review of Satisfactory (less than Commendable and much less than Outstanding, which are the commonplace evaluations) that I thought was based upon age discrimination, and the Settlement I signed after about 5 months of negotiations with the GC's office at my former agency. Below is page one of that 5-page agreement, which basically covers the findings of fact. There's a formula to ratings, and I was one single point away from a Commendable rating in these highly subjective, carefully crafted and reverse engineered evaluations. I would still have disagreed with a Commendable but I wouldn't have informally complained about it because I was a go-along guy in the division, I know how subjective these evaluations are, and realize that managers protect their pets with elevated ratings. But the Satisfactory (barely above Minimally Acceptable) assigned to me was outrageously and pointedly low, unjustified, and I felt I was being singled out due to my age plus I was nobody's pet and all of my managers were a full generation younger than me. So I followed the avenues laid out as necessary for redress in the Administrative Manual, which processes are mostly a huge stall tactic in my opinion. I went and discussed the improperly low evaluation informally with the manager who gave it to me and asked her to change it after giving her my reasons. She smilingly said No. I filed a grievance, which was a waste of time because it was ruled upon by one of the very managers who signed the very evaluation I was complaining about. There was no recourse or oversight to the disparaging, and wrong, opinion he wrote. That left only the informal complaint process to the HR office, based upon my assertion of ageism in my evaluation, which had months in which to try to reach a resolution before I could file a Formal Complaint.

Below is a closer look at the top of page 1, the Findings of Fact agreed to by the two parties to the Settlement Agreement. To continue my tale about the time-suck that complainants about ageism and other improprieties at federal agencies run into is that my improperly low evaluation was done on August 26, 2015. The informal complaint I filed with the agency's HR office about it, based on age discrimination, went to December with no discernible progress at all. Then the HR office negotiator in effect threw up her hands and said sorry, they (the tightly banded-together four managers) won't budge, there's nothing I can do. I was given my options, to either let it go or file a Formal Complaint with the agency's HR office, which would then be investigated over the course of six more months. I chose to do the latter, but I still wasn't any closer to an actual resolution in front of an impartial arbiter (a court, you know) as 2015 slipped into 2016. But the formal complaint process did carry with it assurances that I would not be subjected to retaliation because, or perhaps only during the pendency, of my formal complaint. This assurance sounded very high-minded.

Below is a close-up of the text of page one of the settlement. The negotiations included the exchange of three drafts of the final agreement, which were always crafted by the GC's office at my former agency, after extended discussions. This page incorporates our agreed to findings of fact, including the fact that "On May 27, 2016, Mr. Lamberton amended his formal complaint with additional allegations of a hostile work environment, which culminated in his involuntary retirement in May 2016." That's how it was, I felt that I was retaliated against at the end of May during the pendency of the investigation into my Formal Complaint by a manager who in my opinion had engaged in retaliation before. I felt compelled to retire suddenly on Memorial Day in 2016 rather than to continue in a hostile work environment such as I was apparently in. My involuntary retirement had definite drawbacks. My income was suddenly and immediately slashed by well over 80%, ruining all my financial plans for the future. The further allegations of retaliation near the end of the original six-month investigation into my formal complaint of ageism added another six months to the investigation. There hadn't been a single word of credible settlement discussion so far.

At this point, it had been about nine months since my complained-about evaluation. Notably, in the fall of 2015 I received a team award for my work in the important auto-recall line of cases. The receipt of this award had obviously not been taken into consideration during my evaluation in August, which lacked one single point of pushing my rating from the sub-standard Satisfactory rating to the more acceptable and commonplace (but still too low) Commendable rating. I believed that this subsequent award for notable and significant work I had done during the same exact period that the evaluation had covered was exactly the later-surfacing evidence that would improve my rating, obviously. Or was this award that everyone on the team received, signifying all of our excellent work in this fully successful and ground-breaking field, merely a feel-good fillip that means nothing? I think that the rest of that excellent team would dispute that, and I was not a dog amongst thoroughbreds on it. But the reaction of the management team responsible for my unjustifiably low evaluation to this newly uncovered and hitherto unknown evidence in my favor was nil. So now I was prematurely out of a job, with a pint-sized horse statue, the symbol of my former agency, as my supposed full reward for a quarter-century of dedicated and excellent work, along with a left-behind bogus Satisfactory final rating.

Order of Dismissal

There are two main problems that keep inequities, indeed even illegalities, present if not endemic or rampant at agencies, corporations, entities and with powerful individuals. NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) and the lengthy, mandatory process involved in reporting and pursuing allegations at HRA offices. My case wherein I suffered an "involuntary retirement in May 2016" is such an example. My original complaint was based upon age discrimination after I received, in my opinion, an unfair, biased and erroneous substandard evaluation of Satisfactory on August 26, 2015. The Order of Dismissal below, one of six pages that encapsulates the settlement of my case, which I shall publish this week, is dated September 20, 2017, effecting the settlement on or about that date. Its issuance is more than 2 years after the occurrence I originally complained about, the erroneous performance appraisal that was allegedly biased based upon age discrimination. I followed the process presented to me fully, and that is how long it took to resolve the matter. This is too long a process and the lengthy, built in delays cause many people to give up in despair, go silent and get on with their lives and careers, especially because there are strong social pressures based upon many factors to not make waves. Not the least of these pressures comes from the fact that if a complaint eventually goes to litigation, your colleagues might be called to testify and will be given the Hobson's choice of remembering correctly the sequence of events and the atmosphere in your shop or not remembering it (I don't recall.). Most of them will be returning to their jobs and working for years or decades with the same managers.

You will notice that this Order of Dismissal, entering the attached 5-page stipulated settlement, is dated September 20, 2017, and it was issued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Washington Office, an administrative law body, and signed by an ALJ (Administrative Law Judge). It has its own docket number, EEOC No. 570-2017-00377X, which refers to the Agency No. 2016-2. I timely filed this Complaint with the EEOC office on December 27, 2016, after the lengthy and exhaustive investigation was completed at my agency. I could not have filed it with an ALJ any earlier. This was almost a year and a half after the original occurrence of the allegedly unfair, biased and erroneous evaluation I complained about, following the presented process. I was out of a job following my "involuntary" retirement in May, 2016 and this was another thing hanging over my head along with my 80% income diminution. There were no meaningful settlement discussions about my complaint during that entire year and a half. Perhaps, dear reader, you can you get a sense of the pressures that build up during the pendency of a complaint as time slowly passes and one year turns into the next with no end in sight.  There are two interesting things about the dates on the document that will be discussed in the paragraph below.

I filed the EEOC Complaint on December 27, 2016 and the first time I received a single thing back from the EEOC was on September 20, 2017, the Order of Dismissal which entered the stipulated settlement. This was almost 9 months later! It was radio silence before that from the court. I didn't receive a docket number, nor an acknowledgement of receipt, or a scheduling order. Nada. After about six months, I started fretting that I was "sleeping on my rights" and that I could have my case dismissed for lack of prosecution so I called the GC's (General Counsel's) office at my former agency to inquire if they had heard anything back from the court. That event started settlement discussions for the first time, about 20 months after the occurrence originally complained about. I was told, which I had no reason to disbelieve, that this lack of response so far by the court was not unusual and that the actual litigation itself, once it started, could take a year or or even years to conclude. Can you imagine the pressure that the passage of time builds upon you as you anticipate years of litigation ahead and the cost of extensive discovery?  I was litigating by myself with no real resources against all of the staff and resources of my former agency's GC's office. This leads to the second interesting date on the document, the date indicated by the agency's referral No., 2016-2. This told me that during the entire year of 2016, mine was only the second complaint that had been pursued this far (remember that I filed my case with the EEOC on during the last week in December of 2016) from my former agency, a smallish but by no means tiny agency. No wonder I was only one of two formal complaints! The process is so drawn out and oppressive that it must cause many or most people to just go away, and especially with age discrimination, perhaps the person will just expire in the meantime.

So here, for today, I will end my tale of filing a complaint with the HR department at my former agency. Below is the backside showing the two opposing counsels in the case being resolved by the Order of Dismissal.  As stated, this document entered the stipulated settlement more than two years after the original occurrence complained about. My case did include an allegation about illegal retaliation, which did add some months to the agency's HR office's investigation, but in my experience, retaliation, which might or might not be in the eye of the beholder, was not unheard of.  I believed I had witnessed retaliation at my former agency just the year before from the same actor and based upon a similar set of circumstances and allegations.

Movies

Last year I saw ten movies.  One I can't remember, but the others were, in loose order of how I liked them, these, although I might have the exact titles wrong:

Dunkirk.  A rousing, well-told spectacle about the British evacuation by boat lift of their surrounded army from the French mainland in 1940 during the fall of France.  It might have saved the world from the scourge of Nazism, although as Churchill drily noted, wars are not won by evacuations.

Darkest Hour.  Another Dunkirk era tale, this time focusing on the lonely struggle of Winston Churchill to keep Britain in the fight during their darkest hour of World War II, and thereby maybe saving the world from the scourge of Nazism, once America finally got in the fight a year and a half later.

Beauty and the Beast.  Yeah, a musical.  I got dragged to it under false pretenses but I liked it.

Hidden Figures.  A stirring (and true) tale of black women's fight against not only sexism but racism.

The Batman Leggo Movie.  We sneaked into it after another show.  It was funny.

Despicable Me 3.  We sneaked into it after another show.  It was funny.

Thor.  It was deadpan funny, inspiring, well-paced and well done.

A Monster Calls.  It was about a tree in the cemetery, is what I remember.  And fatherhood, I think.

Fist Fight.  It was dreadful and unwatchable, something about a beleaguered schoolteacher in a tough school.  We walked out after 20 minutes and snuck into another show.

Reading a Little

In accord with the chaotic year just past, I only read 8 books in 2017.  I am currently reading three other books simultaneously but I am bogged down in all three, although one has become more informative and interesting near the end (I have ten more dense pages to go on a study by an academic on Japan's rush to war with the U.S. in 1941), another book I'll eventually struggle through because it is classic literature by Virginia Woolf but I'm not getting its point yet, and the last one is a tedious survey of the last 500 years of community histories following the Columbian Exchange.  I expect you'll read about these books next year here.

The best book I read was Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, copyright 2009 & 2017, a detailed study of detailed American and Japanese war plans in 1945 for the Americans' final assault on the Japanese Empire's home islands in 1945 (on Kyushu) and 1946 (on Hokkaido).  It would have been hell, with a million casualties on the American side and ten million or more on the Japanese side, with tactical use of nuclear bombs by the Americans on the battlefield, over which the American infantrymen would traverse because of the immature realization at the time of radioactive aftereffects.  It was gruesome if laborious reading to me because my Dad was a combat Marine in the theatre, with two horrific battles already engaged in (Peleliu and Okinawa), and he almost certainly would have been killed at age 21 in the bloody assault.  Perhaps you can already guess how I feel about the use of two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities (which induced Japan to surrender) and whether its use in Asia was "racist" or not (these bombs would certainly have been used on Germany when available if that country hadn't already been overcome).  Japan had over 15,000 radar-evading wooden-framed kamikaze planes hidden away in hardened, hidden hangars for the final battle (three times as many as the American planners reckoned on), thousands of similarly radar-invisible wooden high speed suicide boats collected for use against the Allied armada, and many combat-hardened divisions brought over from China dug in at and behind all the invasion beaches (they knew by deduction exactly where the Allies would land), just waiting for the ultimate Gotterdammerung.

A close second as the best book I read last year is The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, a novel published in 1938.  Using exquisite language and spellbinding descriptions, Faulkner deals head-on with the racial problem in America, focusing on the racist South where racism was casual and non-controversial, a white author using the N-word liberally and casually.  Because, like it or not, that's the way it actually was back then, whether you want to deny it and ban it or not.  I loved this book, about the family majordomo, Granny, who keeps the family together during the waning days of the Civil War when the menfolk are away fighting.  With the help of her teen grandson's companion slave, a very clever boy the same age as her kin and raised in the household with him, she bilks the invading Yankees out of much livestock (which she distributes to the needy) and scores of contraband (liberated) slaves (whom she sent back to their "homes," where else did they have to go?) who represented a drag upon the bluecoats' offensive impetus.  This matriarch's death at the hands of a band of renegade Rebel deserters in one last sham transaction leads to a tale of devastating southern vengeance.

The other half-dozen books I read were interesting (like Last to Die (2015) by Stephen Harding, about the last U.S. airman to die in the air on a photo reconnaissance mission over Japan two days after the Japanese acceptance of the Allies' surrender terms, at the hands of fanatical Japanese fighter pilots who refused to accede to the Emperor's surrender dictum) or not (like Operation Barbarossa (2011) by Christian Hartman, a formulaic short account of Hitler's dreary war in Russia which doomed his Third Reich practically from the outset of this onslaught).  Here are the remainder of the books I read last year in addition to those already mentioned:  Monty's Men (2013) by John Buckley, an account of the British and Canadian armies under the command of British General Bernard Montgomery in northwest Europe after D-Day; Lincoln and His Generals (1952) by T. Harry Williams, any description of the Young Napoleon, General George McClellan who prolonged the war by years due to his megalomania and indecisiveness, is always interesting; The First World War (1998) by John Keegan, an insightful and pithy exposition of the run-up to the conflict and an insightful and pithy exposition of its aftereffects sandwiched around 400 pages of dreary recounting of large armies on the move; and Sinai Victory by S.L.A. Marshall (1956) about the abortive but successful Israeli military takeover of the Sinai peninsula in 1956 on a shoestring basis, sort of a precursor to the 1967 war which forged the modern Middle East.

New Year's Day

New Year's day was a glorious start to 2018, despite how bitterly cold it was.  There were exciting college bowl games on the telly.

I had a delicious lunch at my favorite local restaurant at noon, dining as usual with the Empty Chair.  Enroute to the Lost Dog, I passed by my man Trevor, out at his usual spot on a street corner, interacting with passing motorists despite the frigid temperatures.

Coming home after lunch I could see in passing by that the mother of my children has her condominium for sale.  My oldest son has, I think, lived there with her and her new husband in the past and so far as I know in the present too, so I suppose he'll be moving on too, perhaps to their new location; I last laid eyes on him and spoke to him in, I think, 2007, so I won't be missing anything, especially as concerns her, who provides me with zero information about our children (even whether or not they're well or even alive) and her stony-hearted new husband.

I miss my children though, as their unjustified and indeed totally gender-driven estrangement from me and the whole rest of my family stretches on absurdly past a decade.  Next up--middle child, I'll be at the Lost Dog at noon on your upcoming birthday for lunch; come on, now that you're a fully-mature adult and responsible for your own actions, give healing a try and join me!

Happy New Year's

Happy New Year!  Let's make this year Great!

I changed my profile picture for 2018 to this snapshot from a year ago.  I was in DC at the time enroute to a protest march against the faux president.

In 2018 I hope to travel, at least around North America.  And read more.

I hope my children are well.  And that peace reigns over the world.