As is typical of most things in life, I didn’t exactly get to pick my retirement date. Right after praising me for “Saving The Company” during an annual Board Meeting, my boss pulled me aside and told me to clean out my desk because my skills were “not a fit for what needs to be done”. This notice wasn’t exactly a surprise as other events had given me some warning and I had already passed through the various phases of loss. At some time during the last year of my employment I “got tired”. I was done, toast, didn’t want to participate, get out of my office and leave me the hell alone… While I still found the technical work interesting and rewarding I was tired of dealing with whiney, nasty people. Mind that these were all peers and above, not subordinates. I was tired of herding cats and only receiving a beating as a reward. The surprising part was that I hadn’t really began to come to grips with my “innards” until just a few weeks before I was let go.
I had plenty of transition time available and in a matter of ten days I had two job offers and one pending. However it wasn’t until I had the offers in-hand that the crisis struck… What was I doing? I had become so involved with thehabit of being employed that I had not considered whether I wanted to be employed. After taking a couple of days to think about it I knew I didn’t want to work for someone else again.
This was a complete shock for my spouse and everyone who worked with me. I have always been driven by challenge, no one believed I would be able to leave my up-tempo environment and enter a life of doing nothing. I’m not sure I believed it myself but I certainly knew I couldn’t continue on the same path, something had to change. So, I rejected the offers and “did the deed” – I retired.
Thus begins the real saga “Retired In Omaha”… …03/11/11