Lost Badge

My office uses those white proximity badges that resemble a thick credit card. These cards control physical access to the building (as long as no one is polite). I hold it up to the card reader, and it greets me with a friendly beep, a satisfying click, and a knowing wink of the little green light. Now that I think about it, I think it is flirting with me.

There is one catch. This happy sequence of affirming and flirtatious interactions with the door depends on me having my badge with me. If I don’t, the door shuns and rejects me. The card reader glares at me with an untrusting red eye and refuses to open. The door remains cold and unyielding to my touch. Without my badge, the door treats me much the same way my ex-wife does.

I have a history of misplacing my door badge (in 23 years I never managed to find a badge that would cause my ex-wife to treat me as well as the door, but that’s a separate story). The receptionist knows me a little too well. She’s warm and bubbly and friendly, but she knows I only enter through the main door when I’ve misplaced my badge.

I lose my badge so often that we have an unspoken ritual dance for getting me a temporary replacement.

I timidly approach the nine-foot-tall glass doors at the main entrance to my office. I stand there for a minute looking down at the cold-hearted, unsympathetic card reader. I put the saddest look on my face that I can muster. She looks up, notices me and raises her right eyebrow and the right corner of her mouth. Her harsh, unapproving look shoots through the glass like a laser. I briefly look up from the card reader. I make momentary eye contact, while simultaneously putting on my best sad-puppy-dog face. I then glance away in shame. She opens the door for me.

I pass through causeway and approach the reception desk like a convicted felon approaching the bench.

She opens the drawer containing the temporary badges and pulls out the green book of shame.

The green book of shame is a ledger that tracks the temporary badge numbers and the names of the transgressors . My name appears frequently in the green book of shame, often multiple times on a page.

When she issues a temporary badge, she records the date, time, badge number, and name on a new line. When the badge is returned, that row is closed out with a single, neat line. She draws the strike-out freehand but it appears as straight as if she used a ruler. The single line lets her know that the debt has been repaid but also to still see the list of prior offenders.

I already knew that this time was not going to go as smoothly. We both knew the ritual, but I knew that I had made a giant misstep this morning. I stood there, paralyzed, waiting for her to spot my latest transgression.

Suddenly, her eyes were wide open. Her pupils dilated and she looked up at me in horror. There, in the green book, just a few lines above where she started to write my name, was another line with my name on it.

The thing that differentiated my line from the lines above and blew it was that it had not been crossed out.

There I was. My secret shame revealed, there was nothing I could do but stand there and hope she would be merciful.

I had not only misplaced my badge, I had misplaced the temporary replacement that she gave me a week ago. I was a multiple badge offender.

I wondered what protocol for a repeat, consecutive, serial offender such as myself. Would she banish me to work in the stairwell where the WiFi was sketchy and the coffee machine was out of reach? Would she issue me some sort of ankle bracelet card so that she could track its whereabouts?

She gave me a stern look and finished writing the line in the book.

“Do I need to cancel your original card?”, she asked.

“No, not yet.”, I pleaded like a death row inmate asking for a few more hours of life. “I’m pretty sure that I think I may know approximately where it might be; more or less. Uh, yeah. Your desk is very clean.”

My inner voice began to criticize the one doing the talking. “Oh, that was smooth. Nice going, Shakespear!”

She handed me the badge. I lowered my head and slunk away toward my desk.

This weekend, I’ll scour the house for my other two badges. In the meantime, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I lose this one, I intend to find a new job rather than face that level of humiliation again.