The Retirement Party - Good-byes in the Digital Age.

My friend Dermot -- my very, very good friend Dermot -- arranged a retirement party for me last night. It was a very nice affair.  Good food, good beverages, nice parting gifts, good friends and a cake (a very cool cake).  It was time to say good-bye to my colleagues, friends and boss.  But the good-byes were not quite as I expected them.  One or two tearful hugs, but mostly see-you-laters and promises to keep in touch.  It wasn't so long ago that the promise to keep-in-touch was somewhat idle -- a phone call or two, then just the exchange of Christmas cards each year. Things change and people move on, that's to be expected.  However, email, text messaging, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media make it easy to extend the relationship and its seems likely that I will continue to communicate with a lot of these fine people long into the Life After.

Now that said, I want to say thank you to everyone for making the Life During such a great experience.  Thank you for accepting me and letting me do what I do the way I wanted to do it.  I won't miss the staff meetings, status reports, performance appraisals, organizational development meetings, strike assignment training, expense vouchers, outside counsel bill reviews, and all the administrative things that had to be processed, updated, annotated, forwarded, clicked-on-here, approved-there, verified, certified and spindled. But I will miss the people who did those things with me, to me and for me, at least until the next email or text.  "Good-bye" is a outdated term, at least the traditional definition no longer applies.  I'm not going to use it anymore and I definitely won't miss it.

A House Is Not A Home.

The last 15 years of my career I moved 4 times.  I spent the first 16 years in the SF Bay Area.  When SBC bought Pacific Telesis Group, my job moved to San Antonio, TX.  We were in San Antonio 6 years, 4 months, 20 days and 18 hours.  I remember this because we arrived in San Antonio at 4:30 PM on Millennium Eve, December 31, 1999 (no, I don't want to debate whether the Eve was actually one year later). We left San Antonio for Central New Jersey at 10:30 AM on April 20, 2006, which was my wife's birthday (some birthday!).  Six years in San Antonio is a long time -- that's a story for another post.  2-1/2 years later we moved to Dallas.  3-1/2 years later we moved back to the New Jersey.  Each move was a new house, all of which had a certain charm, but none of which seemed like Home.  When the retirement offer came up, Susan and I realized this was our chance to make that last move, but no place we'd live so far felt like Home.  As much as I loved SF (the first 40 years) and living no more than the length of her apron strings from my mother, you can never go Home.
Too much has changed.

Susan had an epiphany while scanning family photos, and realized that all our kid's photos from birthdays, Passover, Christmas, and Thanksgiving included extended family members.  She recognized that Home is where the grandchildren are.  So we're off to Seattle to be near our son, his wife and our granddaughter.

As is our custom, we went in for a weekend house-hunt and left with a house under contract.  We listed the house in New Jersey and sold it 4 days later.  Slam-bam, thank you m'am.  This Seattle house is just a house -- not our Home.  Now we have a chance to settle in to Seattle and see how we like it before we commit to a Home.  The Home.  I never understood it quite before, but Home is where Family is and we've been itinerate too long.

When Did 9:30 PM Become Bedtime?

When you're working, evening is the time that you watch TV, surf the Web, check your email, update the task list and try to do a little work.  You know, just enough work to take the edge off the next day. Get ahead, which really means getting a little less behind.  Get in the last word at work the night before to ruin someone else's morning.  Not being mean -- just the way it was.  Getting the edge, making the next morning more tolerable.  I had not realized that when you're not working, the distractions aren't distractions anymore. They're your retirement job.  It's 9:30 PM and I finished my evening chores. Feels like I should be able to keep going, but I've run out of "work" to do.  If I did any more today, I might not have anything to do tomorrow.   It's 9:30 PM -- bedtime, I think. Perhaps this is why an accepted definition of "retirement" is "going to bed (early)."  I didn't see that coming.

Are Sundays the Worst?

Despite conventional wisdom about the freedom one experiences on weekends, the worst day of the week for me has always been Sunday.  To be precise, if you dread going back to work on Mondays, anticipation of Monday has got to be the worst. Since Sunday is the day before Monday, and anticipation of Monday is strongest on Sunday, then Sunday is the worst day of the week.  This is "work logic" -- it you think about it, the blahs you get in the afternoon on Sunday is evidence of the truth of what I'm saying.  So here's the thing . . . if you don't have to go to work on Monday, are Sunday's still the worst?  I'm not sure.  It's been less than a week since I started Living the Life After. It still feels like a Sunday afternoon, but I can't fathom why it feels that way.  I don't have to get up any earlier on Monday than I did on Sunday, not that I'll ever be able to sleep-in past 5:30, but the week has to start someday. Why not a Monday? Monday should not scare me anymore -- it is no different than a Saturday (the BEST day of the week). But now I just have to get over the dread of Monday. How about this . . . logic has it that the day furthest from the next Monday is the current Monday, so Monday is the best day of the week because the next Monday is more than a week away. Obviously, I'm going to have to work on this.

It's a Little Weird

Day One:  A little strange.  I made an appointment at the Genius Bar in an Apple Store at the Mall.  I was scheduled for 11:15, but I was up at my usual time and more than ready to go at 7:30.  I stalled until 9:45, but got to the Mall at 10:30 for my 11:15 Apple Genius appointment. There was no one in the mall but me, or at least I didn't see anyone. I've never been in the mall when it was so empty.  Every store I walked into was empty, but the salespeople seemed genuinely happy to see me.  I was apparently their favorite customer. Who knew? Only time I'd be in a Mall during the day in the middle of the week was the week before Christmas.

I left the computer with the Genius and then had an early lunch alone with my headphones on and no one bothered me.  I did a little email, but that only took about 15 minutes. I went home and did some paperwork, then went with my wife to get her dress fitted for Carlyn's wedding (I held her purse, of course).  

I traded messages with people who didn't see my good-bye note yesterday.  I updated my LinkedIn status to "Retired" and click on a few invitations. I made a list of things I needed to do -- got through one of the items ("fix Sue's computer") and decided to move the rest to tomorrow's To Do list. I may reorganize the list.

Day Two:  A little Weird.  So far, it's been sorta like a three-day weekend.  My wife has a list of things I've been putting off doing and I no longer have any excuses to put them off.   We ticked off a couple of items on "the List", which felt good.  There is no question I'm no longer in charge.

I got a hair cut, told the barber I was retired and he automatically gave me a $1 off. I took my car to the dealer for a car wash, got a free cup of coffee and a muffin, and drove off in 30 minutes in the middle of the day.  

I checked my email, and I was caught up in about 5 minutes. I checked the inbox every 15 minutes like I usually do, but I didn't get any mail.  

I rolled the coins in my change jar.  I took everything out of my backpack and then repacked it. I consolidated files on my too many hard drives.

I started a blog.

Yup, it's weird.

The Life After

In the last 10 years or so, as my contemporaries at AT&T began to retire, each of them returned with stories of The Life After AT&T.  It caused me to think about my Life After AT&T, mostly as a planning exercise, but partly out of curiosity, fear and anticipation.  I thought about teaching or working as a part-time lawyer (I'm a lawyer), or maybe doing something that would allow me to be with people and provided a reason to get going in the morning.  Maybe work at Starbucks (the Barista Barrister) or Trader Joe's for the employee discounts.  Anyway, it's too early to know what's next for a lot of reasons that should become apparent in the next installments.  My plan is to post to this blog the daily events of Living the Life After.  I make no promises, but I hope the observations and stories will amuse you.  Feel free to share.  I have nothing (much) to hide.