As one door opens....

....another slams so hard in your face it leaves nothing but an unrecognisable, mangled mess.

Suspended. Until further notice.

That, if I had anything resembling a Facebook profile, would be my current work status. If it was for some egregious mistake I had made, I would have to hold my hand up and accept my fate. But I'm being 'punished', because that's how I see things, even if it's supposedly pending further investigation, for someone else's stupid mistake. This person is, on paper, almost as experienced as me, and in a similar position to the one I've been in over the past few months, namely learning the idiosyncrasies of this particular job, rather than being someone starting from scratch, and my 'crime' was to have the misfortune to be the duty person for the job when he made his mistake. Our training manual, such as it is, states that an experienced operative should be expected, after four weeks of training, which this man has completed, to be able to work 'under minimal supervision'. It wasn't as if I'd gone home early leaving him in charge, or even left the room to use the toilet - I was sitting with the shift manager, observing what my 'trainee' was doing, but what he did was such an basic, fundamental breach of regulations that no-one could reasonably have expected a man with his experience to do it, and, in any case, the way the equipment operates, and given the scenario which unfolded, there's no way I could have prevented him from doing it even if I'd been standing right next to him. The person who's suspended me isn't my line manager, but one of his opposite numbers from another area who happens to be the out of hours 'on-call' person this week, so it is possible that I'll be reinstated almost immediately, but that's hardly the point, as far as I'm concerned. After 32 years' unblemished service, I've been tarred with the brush of incompetence because I didn't prevent an unpreventable incident, in which, as it transpired, no-one was hurt and no damage was done to anything other than 'the letter of the law', although I'll admit that such an error could have had much more serious consequences had the situation been different.
I've run through a fair gamut of emotions in the last 6 or 7 hours since the event occurred, ranging from being furiously angry to almost suicidally depressed - I had a vivid mental image of the 56 tablets of my next prescription, due today, all nice and white and lined up ready to be swallowed - but what has crystallised out of the swirl of moods and feelings of this morning is an absolute determination not to be disciplined over this. If that's the way my employer decides to go, they'll have a resignation on their hands. You can call me immature, illogical, or anything else that comes to mind, but what I'm not prepared to be is supine. The next move depends on what my manager has to say - he's supposed to be ringing me soon.
More later, I suspect.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B