Badges?! We don't need no stinkin' badges!

Well, actually, we do. I work in a "secure facility" and we have enough staffers in this office now to exceed the governments "no badge required" limit.

So today - over the loud objections of Upper Management - we all got our pictures taken with a office digital camera (thank you, thank you, thank you, God, not a Polaroid) and we have been presented with nicely laminated badges with our names and the company logo and spiffy blue lanyards from which to hang them. I feel more secure already.

And since the company fell out of the practice of walking new folks around and introducing them, we can all become masters of the covert glance tummywards to determine the name of the person with whom we are riding the elevator, pouring coffee, clearing paper jams.

The idea, of course, was that in a Department of Motor Vehicles-type way, each staffer would sit in front of the camera, have a picture taken that is recognizably that person, receive the laminated badge, go back to our desks, and move on with life. You know, go away and get out of Ken and Sheila's hair! This plan didn't take into account the fact that Tanya and I would be among the teeming masses. By the time I arrived around 8:30, Tanya had already talked Ken and Sheila into taking four different pictures of her and was heading towards a fifth (picture, not "of Scotch").

I had my picture taken while Tanya critiqued hers and made PhotoShop suggestions about how to improve it. PhotoShop isn't an option here, so they redid hers. I accepted mine with a reasonable amount of grace, which means that I hated it, but it's just a badge, for pity's sake, not a movie poster that we're mounting on entire buildings in Times Square. And I looked better than Aileen Wuornos did in the only picture I've seen of her.

But then I noticed that other people's pictures (Tanya and I spent a fair bit of the morning peering over Sheila's shoulder and admiring or dissing pictures) didn't have quite the pasty dead look that mine did. So I campaigned for a re-take. Fortunately for me, Tanya had broken the Security staff's will already, so I only had to "pretty please" once. With Tanya present for a hair and make-up consult, we redid mine. And I like it better. It's nicer than my passport photo, not as good as my driver's license photo, and far, far better than most community theater lobby stills of me.

If you want to see what my badge photo looks like, come to Silver Spring and take me to lunch. Other than that, here's a link to one of the few pictures taken of me after age 5 that I like. Pity that Ken and Sheila wouldn't let me put it on my badge.

http://www.geocities.com/ulahlica/GAL/galout.html

(No! I am not the guy with the beard! Scroll down for a while until you see my name. The other folks in the "gallery" are a bunch of my Gilbert & Sullivan buddies.)