The age brittle plastic parted unexpectedly. The snap that left me with a badge-holder in my hand but no string connecting it to the reel was far less of a shock than the realization of what it represented.
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| The old on top, with the new on the bottom. |
It had about a year and a half since I changed industries, leaving behind the rains of Washington and the career I’d focused my teen years to obtain for the (hopefully) greater security of a financial industry job and a shorter commute in South Dakota. Still I’d kept one vestige of my time as a game developer: the hefty metal badge reel emblazoned with the neon green ‘X’ symbol of Xbox. I’d earned that badge in the hours I’d spent on Xbox Live, Kameo, and Forza; it stood out from the standard purple reels to which almost everyone else affixed their ID badges.
But winter cold and summer heat are not the friends of cheaply made plastics, and the inevitable finally happened: the connection holding the reel and string to the badge holder finally snapped. When it went, it did so in the most irrevocable way possible, leaving no way to reliably replace the plastic piece. My badge reel was toast. It’s probably for the best.
Clinging to the past just isn’t productive, better to move forward and focus on the exciting opportunities of the future than to keep looking back at what once was or could have been. I’m sure I’ll be replacing this new badge holder with something sturdier that I can safely trust to not fall off my belt while riding my Harley down the road in summer; perhaps a H-D badge reel (assuming such a thing exists) would be an appropriate mark of my future rather than my past.