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My Life As A Professional

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Retirement: when you stop living at work and start working at living. - Anonymous

After 27 years, the end of my professional life was near.

I'd begun to feel the stress of a looming deadline, gotten tired of watching the same office scenes day after day, and became simply grumpy in the mornings since I had to switch out of PJs and slip into a proper dress.

Work fascinated me. I could sit and look at it for hours.

Now older and wiser, I'd discovered that there were six things that I really loved about my job. Pay day, lunch time, quitting time, vacation time, holidays, and of course...

Retirement. 

When I finally retired, I didn't want pomp and circumstance, just a quiet no-party day of unscheduled drop-ins from co-workers who wanted to say goodbye. But I did prepare a retirement speech just in case the event became a gathering.

This was what I wrote.

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RETIREMENT SPEECH, March 2010

For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave for good. As each semester rolled by, I kept asking myself the question: If life is a bowl of cherries, what am I doing in the pit of the HTC?

Thus, early this year, I did a quick math of all the license plate numbers on the northwest parking lot of campus, divided the total by GCC's spring semester FTSE, then multiplied that by the total number of open lab hours in the HTCs - and determined with the result that I got that retiring early seemed about as right as it could be.

I will admit that I had thought about the downside to retiring. 

For one thing, retiring means I can no longer call in sick so I can shop at the mall. The second most important thing is that I will have to drink coffee on my own time. Thirdly, I will have to come to terms that doing nothing will be very hard to do because... I will never know when I'm finished.

Now that this dream to escape... er... to be released from my working career is finally going to be a reality, I cannot help but be melancholic about the things that I will miss.

I will miss sprinting to get to my office door to log in to the Employee Schedule Board lest it emblazon my name with the shameful scarlet message, Not checked in.

I am going to miss dealing with Error messages and hearing the squeals from unplugged audio cords on the iMacs.

I will miss the High Tech clients who think that with ESP, we can guess what course they are registered in and who their instructor might be; and more so, those who think that we have PHDs in biotechnology and calculus and therefore are able to assist them in their computer course assignments.

I will miss meetings of all kinds - which, by the way, I am more convinced than ever, are the true culprits to the non-achievement of our full potential as an organization.

I don't expect that you will want to continue communicating with me, but if you do, to access LIVE CHAT WITH DORIS I will need to issue you a username. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 15 characters - with 5 uppercase letters, 5 lowercase letters, and 5 numeric characters. 

To authenticate initial usage, you will need to answer 3 security questions, after which you will receive a temporary password that you can then change using the secure account wizard website that will be set up for that purpose. After you enter your message in the textbox and click on Start Chat, a popup window will appear indicating your position in the queue and an estimated time frame for an answer. And not to forget, it will cost you ten cents per ink side to a get a printed copy of my response.

I'd like to thank you for the Soleri bell and lovely card. Every time I look at them I will be reminded of how all my hard work got me this one reward.

In closing, I'd like to pass on my condolences to my friends whom I'm leaving behind.

To others, may I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous semester.

My prayer is that I may be granted the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to see the difference.

Thank you. 

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P.S. I was asked to write a history of micro-computing at the college. I complied and entitled it, Not Everything You Want To Know About Micro-Computing at GCC... But It Is A Start: A Spotty History 1983-2010.

It's a good read. Funny. Not computerese. I should reproduce it as a blog at a later time.