loyalty rewarded (or not)

About a week ago, at an evening dinner/staff meeting, at which we were all a bit surprised to see our grand kahuna (the Director of Surgical services for the North Okanagan) I received a special presentation. It turns out the reason she had come, was to present me with my TEN YEAR SERVICE PIN! I, like most of the other people there, was speechless, not by the amazing thoughtfulness of Interior Health for presenting me with this genuine sterling silver lapel pin with its telling IH swoosh (which has some deep significance that I have forgotten), rather, by the fact that it was a TEN YEAR Pin. What the....?I have been working at the same hospital, according to my calculations, for 22 years, since March 1986, when I selfishly uprooted my family, and made them move some 400 miles to the east, so I could take a job as Critical Care float at the Vernon Jubilee Hospital. I was tickled to be here and they were lucky to have me(they were terribly short of CC nurses back then, not like now(haha)). It was a win-win situation. Nine short months later, my part time job as a float became a full time one in the ER, something I stuck with for 12 years, finally burning out as a result of substandard staffing levels, and an increasing feeling of impending doom, if I didn't get the heck out of Dodge. So, in 1998 after having spent a fair bit of my own money and time taking palliative care courses by correspondence, I applied for and won a casual position in the community(Home Care as it was then called) In order to do that I had to leave my full time job, so I converted my status, ie I did not quit, to casual, at the hospital as well, to allow me an opportunity to spread my wings and get back to a career that I loved. Moreover, by now, everything: the hospital, the community and whatever else there is , was all blanketed by the grand quilt known as the Interior Health Authority. Bad enough that by changing to casual status, my accumulated sick time(some 750 hrs) and vacation time was deleted from the records, never to find its rightful way back to me, even three years later when I returned to a regular Part time position in PAR (due to health reasons which interfered with my driving abilities, and a need for benefits)
Now here it is 2008 and on IH's records, they have me listed as having a start date of June 4th 1998, which was approximately when I started with home care. So somewhere in the vast wasteland that is the records of the entire Interior Health Region, my first 12 years of work at VJH, has slipped into oblivion. So, any wonder that I was less than thrilled to get that service pin??? As it was I think I was pretty darn polite and put on a pretty little, appropriately grateful fake smile, for it was not this lady's fault, she only arrived on the scene in 2000. And she later told me that she gets these pins in bulk in a big brown envelope with instructions to distribute them tastefully.
So what did I do, you may wonder. I wrote a mostly polite but obviously irrate letter to the Chief Human Resources Officer for Interior Health in Kelowna enclosing the said pin so it can be regifted to someone withonly 10 yrs of service. I also sent copies to my boss, the administrator (or whatever the modern title is now) of the hospital, and the director of Employee and Labor relations, as well as my union steward. Now it is a waiting game.
Why the big deal? First of all, being denied appropriate credit for years served, affects my severance pay at retirement, which in case you, dear reader, need reminding, takes place in 9 short days. Secondly it feels like a sharp kick in the head, to have twelve years of my working life negated, or made to be non existent. I really don't want to end my working relationship with IH on a negative note, and then carry that bitterness with me into retirement. I have seen that happen to a former coworker, and it is not pretty. So I am staying positive with hope that the records will be corrected without me having to resort to a grievance, which I have managed to avoid until this point.
Are you bored beyond belief? Well it's not like you didn't have warning that this would be a rant, Re-read the title of this blog, honey. Another day, I will amuse you with my wit and candor, but today is a rant day.