1/10 - It's 5:52 in the morning, and I am revisiting decade…

2/10 - ... about EEO, Diversity, "avoiding the appearance of impropriety" in assigning salary ranges to different classes of hard and sometimes dirty work, and the extent to which these salaries and classes seem "Stamped from the Beginning," to use a phrase from @DrIbram.

3/10 - These ideas and thoughts woke me up from sound sleep and had their seeds in a dream on a recurring theme I was having: I was back in my Federal Civilian office job, and we were once again wrestling with reorganization because it was moving our duties out from under us

4/10 - I have these kinds of dreams because of, I think, my disposition, which according to the way my Federal @DeptofDefense workforce management wanted to divide up the work to be done, made me a tough person to fit . . and possibly to promote.

5/10 - I had no desire to do anything but the fascinating technical work for which I was hired and, later, for which I boosted my productivity tenfold by cross-training. This came at a price, but also raised in my mind questions about that price.

6/10 - Tendencies in hiring, promotion, and career field diversity worried me at a different level from others - I have never truly minded the road less traveled. But my questions, asked out loud or on our "Intranet," just seemed to earn me the management stink-eye.

7/10 - Such as: I know the office chief jobs tend to go to White Males, but the cleaning crew jobs also tend to go to Black Females. If there is a reason for this, why does that reason also affect the relative salary ranges to which those positions' holders can aspire?

8/10 - I was very interested in the "Technical Track," which was presented to us at least ostensibly as a pathway to management level salaries for technical work... but may have been more like @realDonaldTrump's "Path to Re-election, really, in that regard.

9/10 - I do acknowledge that, despite my noticing the systemic or philosophical quirks whose very state of being observed as I was observing them affected my career, I also did benefit from systemic privilege as a White Male.

10/10 - But the difficulty in getting these kinds of concerns addressed, much less questions answered, and the effect I perceived it had on my "tech-track" promotability, left me a misfit who would retire with a merely adequate pension and many unsettled dreams.

ADDENDUM 1: In an auditorium meeting held for the Research Directorate at my agency, the Research Group's director told us in no uncertain terms "Tech Track is a Management tool." We did not quite know what to make of that.

ADDENDUM 2: Loyalism and sycophant-like behavior seemed the way to me to get higher pay, whether one was in tech-track or management-track, "line" or "staff." It is disturbing to see that encouraged in @DeptofDefense by @realDonaldTrump now... but it was present even then.