Monday, August 3, 2009

Retirement

I was going to do a post on retirement, but for some reason last time I got side-tracked with my last post.

Anywho, they say a lot of people have trouble adjusting to retirement. I have been getting ready for retirement my entire working life. The longest I have worked at one place is when I was in the military (3 years, 8 months and 7 days, that's what it says on my DD214) and that's because I couldn't quit. I did work at a ceiling tile plant for 5 years but I worked there twice with a 2 year gap between working as a carpenter. I left the ceiling tile plant the last time because they stopped using wood for their tile and I thought it was the beginning of the end. I thought the only reason the plant was located UP on the tundra (instead of in the cheap-labor South like the rest of their plants) was the supply of wood. They would have to ship in all the raw materials and ship out the finished goods. Well, the plant has gone thru a number of owners since then, but 30 years later it is still running.

I have had a variety of jobs. I've been a carpenter, migrant aircraft mechanic and a truck driver. Also golf course groundskeeper, K-Mart employee and an interment excavator. Been fired a couple of times, quit a bunch of times and a few times arranged to get laid off so I could draw unemployment between jobs.

I have a lot of gaps in my work history that I like to call Quality Time!! I figured out a long time ago that there is no company loyalty. They expect you to be an obedient, loyal servant, but they'll get rid of you in a heartbeat. What's really interesting is when an employer says it is employment at will and you say that works both ways. They go "What"?? And you say that while they may get rid of you at any time, you are also free to leave at any time!!

The only problem is that I haven't worked in so long, I don't know what I'm retired from!!! But with all the practice I've had, I should have this retirement down pat!!

9 comments:

  1. retirement has it's ups and downs..i'd still like to have a part time job to keep busy..but if i do i'll make too much money and lose all my benefits..sucks..

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  2. Great minds were thinking alike today.

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  3. You're officially an inspiration to me.

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  4. Wonderful. Nice to see you back here...on your break. Enjoy the retirement from...whatever.

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  5. The concept of retirement is an odd one. I am at an age where all my peers are looking at "retiring", but trying to decide when to do it. I know I should probably have some kind of plan myself. But well, having no plan up to this point seems to be working out. Planning for tomorrow always seemed not much better than whining about yesterday.

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  6. Boy, that sounds a lot like me, I've never had a job longer than my time in the Navy.

    Except maybe for when I owned my parts house in Utah, but it would be a close call being as both were about four years.

    Like a dumb fuck I sold out and moved Marie to Montana hoping she would be happy there, she wasn't.

    Guess I should have stayed in Utah, I had a decent business, lived on 60 acres and life was good to me there.

    After leaving her in Montana and moving here I had many jobs until reaching retirement age. Most of them free lance jobs and I didn't work anymore hours than I needed to in order to pay the bills.

    It's simple to figure out what you are retired from, every fucking thing and trying to make others happy, fuck them.

    I fucking love retirement, my only job now is fucking off, camping, and pissing others off calling them fucking idiots. :-)

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  7. Yeah, discovered the "company loyalty" thing myself, looooong ago. Fuck em. Enjoy.

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  8. I bought a cell phone.
    Got my land line number transfered to it because I'm dumping Qwest. Cell phones make me look like an idiot, I can't even figure out how to enter contacts in it. The instruction books suck and are of little help, and the print is too small. Cell phones should come with a DVD so you can watch an instructor showing you how to do things on one so that it doesn't take you hours trying to learn how to use it's features. Someone should be able to make some decent money selling DVD's showing others how to use them, I'd buy one being as I seem to be too frigging stupid to figure out how to use one.

    I guess you have to be a special kind of stupid to be able to rebuild an automatic transmission and use computers and not be able to figure out how to use a cell phone. There's more damn buttons on it than you can shake a stick at and pushing the wrong one just screws thing up.

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  9. It took me awhile to figure out how to put contacts in my cell phone. First you find contacts in the Menu and hit OK and then find add a name and hit OK, enter the name, hit OK, add the number and hit OK. What took me some time to figure out was that in Menu you use the up & down and the left & right keys to navigate the different things in Menu.

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