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My job in natural resources was always fun and rewarding. I loved helping kids learn how to fish and educating them about the natural environment. What I hated was how political it got toward the end. I just wanted to raise fish and work at a beautiful hatchery that was as much park as it was a place to raise fish. After 31 years on the job I was sad to let it go, but realized that it was taking a toll on me. I was about 50 lbs over weight and my stress level was getting higher, mostly due to things out of my control.
I still keep in contact with the people I worked with and even volunteer from time to time. When it rains really hard, I sometimes wake up expecting alarms to go off, then I remember I'm retired and roll over and go back to sleep.
I could have retired in May but I decided to keep working for a bit longer. I suspect HR has told managers that they can’t broach the subject with us oldies....so I brought it up and asked how much notice he wants,
No. In fact, the last 5 years of my career were the best. So why did I retire? I had long since reached the point where my retirement pay was greater than my take home pay (I was heavily into deferred compensation and Roth IRA). I had a defined benefits pension, so I did not need to spend down my investments. And I wanted to earn the additional Medicare credits I needed (I did not pay into Medicare). This was a hedge in case OPERS decided not to pay Medicare A for us grandfathered employees. I needed to do this prior to reaching 65, which I accomplished this year.
There was also the thought that my job could hit another rough patch with good supervisors and fellow employees being replaced by people who would make my life difficult. As a laboratory technician, the amount of quality control required was always increasing. The thought of spending my entire day doing lab work, with no time to do anything else, did not appeal to me. I wanted to leave on a high note, which I did.
I'm 60. The company has cut benefits and pension. No raises in years for anybody. So some fantasy that learning new skills will solve things is not in the ballpark. My job is easy but boring now. I guess I was wondering how people handled a dead end job at the end of a career. I am hanging on for now, but a layoff or bailing out at 62 is looking most likely. I think the place I work is so mismanaged they have forgotten older workers and just wait for them to retire. Which is not a bad thing sometimes.
My wife and I were just talking about this topic earlier this weekend. We both feel busier and more stressed at work than at any time in the preceding decades.
My manager is Retired In Place, cruising toward his retirement in 15 months. His boss is a clueless buffoon with no understanding of how to manage people, nor of the work we are being asked to perform.
Too many of my wife's coworkers are 45 year old narcissistic 'mean girls' with the emotional maturity of Middle Schoolers.
I worked in state government and the workload never decreased - always increased - but it changed in peculiar ways depending who won the last election and whether or not the politicians left you alone or wanted to manipulate outcomes. The election cycle meant that you usually had four years to look forward to, sometime that turned into eight, with whatever the official line turned out to be. Things are getting stranger every year and this started back in the 1990s. Reality was more important some years than others...and then the next administration might have their own agenda that needed to spin things...usually to show how awful the previous guys were. I left when things were clearly going off the rails and I could no longer justify cooking numbers to match the decisions already made.
Nope, I was in a large corporation and the job got more and more demanding until I was putting in close to 60 hour work weeks. I had no quality of life. I could rarely take time off because there was no one to cover my projects. I hated my job with a passion for years, sad to say. Eventually I got so worn down that I felt resignation was the only option. I wouldn't call it "retirement" like others who get a big fat pension and happily skip out the door with a going away party. That didn't happen.
No, for the last 5 years my job keeps getting better. I got an offer to join the company's research unit, and have been working with more and more interesting stuff. I'm getting to write software for autonomous vehicles, a (sorta) introduction to artificial intelligence, and getting to play with some of the coolest tech ever. I work with people who are mostly younger than my kids, but they seem to like me and invite me to join more projects. The company forces us to sit thru the annual kum-ba-yah PC horse**** like all do, but my coworkers are extremely smart and competent, so I don't have to tiptoe on eggshells around them (They can take a joke, and give one too).
Work has never been this much fun, and nor this well paid. I wish it had always been like this. I'm turning 62 soon and my FA says I'm "there" (as far as retirement income). But I'm enjoying myself, the missus has a few years to go before she's "there" so I might as well add some more to the funds. I will say it's remarkably relaxing to know I don't have to work and can say farewell any time.
Just for background, when I started over 20 years ago we had all kinds of analog hardware. I spent a bunch of time just fixing that. Also, we had a monster PBX phone system that was a huge pain. Programming it was a DOS based nightmare, and the hardware would break down and that would have to be fixed or replaced. Tracing down wires and fixing old issues took hours and days. Fast forward to today. All the analog stuff is gone, everything is digital. It hardly ever breaks, and when it does it is either operator error or just a loose cable. As for the PBX, it was thrown in the scrap heap and we bought a Mitel VOIP. It's great. It is so stable, it almost never has any problems and I administer it right off the desktop. We used to bill long distance with a software program. But long distance is now about 3 cents a minute and the business office said it was not worth messing with. Now, we just let people dial anywhere in the continental US and don't even track it. The Mitel guys even told me it would be far less work than the old system but don't tell anybody in the company that. They were right. I can do about anything in minutes. So where before I was the company trouble shooter now I sit in my office waiting for trouble that hardly comes anymore. Other areas have changed as well. With Facebook, Wordpress, and iphones offices now have power they never had before. They do many things themselves and don't need support for those things either. It is a strange way to end my working life. At some point either I will put myself out to pasture or they will. Interesting hearing experiences by other people.
Mine stayed constant from start to finish of my 25 year career. Never a lack of criminals. Many repeat offenders lol
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Analog to digital
