The pension board sent me a letter thanking me for thirty-one years of service at a plant I worked at for six. Same name, same Social Security number, same start date, but the end date was wrong by twenty-five years. They had signature cards from every year, all thirty-one of them. I looked at the cards myself, and the handwriting was mine until 1994, and after that somebody was doing a very good imitation. I called to report it, and the woman said the discrepancy had come up in 2003 and had already been resolved.
I asked her how it had been resolved. She read the note from the file and said the discrepancy had been explained in person by someone who had presented identification. I asked whose identification, and she said the record didn’t specify, only that the person had been accepted as me. That bothered me more than the pension letter itself. I told her I had never visited the plant after 1998, and she asked me to hold while she checked another record. When she came back, she asked whether I had ever had a brother.
I told her I didn’t, and she said there was a beneficiary form attached to the pension account. The beneficiary had been changed in 1994 and again in 2003, and both changes had been made in person. I asked for the names, but she said she couldn’t release them without additional verification. Then she mentioned something strange about the original employment file. There was a photograph attached to it, but the photograph had been replaced sometime in 1994. The old photograph was still referenced in the inventory, but nobody could explain where it had gone.
I drove to the plant the next morning and asked whether they still kept old personnel records. The receptionist found someone who had worked there for decades, and he agreed to look at the file. He came back carrying a folder and stared at me for a long time before asking whether I remembered a man named Daniel. I said no, and he quietly placed an old photograph on the desk. It showed me standing beside another man who looked almost exactly like me, wearing the same work uniform. On the back, in handwriting I recognized as my own, were six words: “He took my place in 1994. I let him.”
