When I retired, although I was ambivalent and uncertain of what lay ahead,  I was fully aware of what I was not going to miss.

I would rather ask forgiveness than permission.

Perhaps sitting in a stolen office chair in my dank, little inventory room partially contributed to my retirement. A retirement that came five years earlier than expected.

That chair required a four-hour drive to Tampa, where I slipped it out the side door of the Tampa corporate office. Seriously! When you steal something while everyone is watching, they, in most cases, assume you’re doing your job!

In the corporate office, everyone sat in those $700, web-backed, cushioned chairs. Fancy chairs that one could make a TRANSFORMER movie about. Chairs with gadgets and levers that move every which way to accommodate the sitter. Chairs with headrests for napping while pretending to work. They had hundreds of those chairs sitting around, unoccupied! Stacks of them, brand-new, in the storage room. Would they “give” me one? No!

So, I picked the nicest one I could find from a conference room that had ten extras sitting along the back wall, rolled it down the hall, out the side door, and into a plainly-marked company van.

That fancy chair was about to replace a $99 Office Depot chair that, every time I moved, squeaked and groaned like it was being tortured!

Enough of that crap! NOT anymore!

How posh is that? Sitting in a $700, fancy chair behind an old, banged-up, six-drawer desk that I absconded from a storage room at one of the company’s retail stores. I pushed the desk against the window of the inventory room and put a label on the door that said, “Inventory,” which allowed me to keep it locked.

Voilé! I had created my very own office!

Enduring Four Mergers

The irony is that my corporate career began in a rickety chair at an old desk against the wall of a garage bay, where I installed mobile telephones in vehicles and was charged with tracking and organizing the retail inventory.

This mess began way back around 1990, with the birth of the CELLULAR PHONE and my very first job within a corporation.

Several years later, after the third merger and while working as a supervisor, I returned to school, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and was immediately offered a management position over several employees across multiple states in the southeast.

Then the fun began!

After nearly 20 years on the job, came the fourth and final merger, whereupon I was demoted to ‘lead technician’ and given a cubicle outside a training room.

My daily torture was to sit amid a half-dozen salespeople and a training manager, all of whom spent their days on endless conference calls! No, no, HELL NO! I did not work 20+ years in this job to end up here!

On top of that, a desperate need developed to escape that irritatingly whining, effeminate voice of our ‘so superior‘ manager. A legend in his own mind, if he could have married himself, I’m certain he would.

EVERY MORNING — EIGHT O’CLOCK, SHARP! He moaned and whined incessantly about those habitual latecomers to his conference calls. “How disrespectful!” After which, he would preview the day’s tickets and review all of yesterday’s, thereby wasting the first hour and a half of our day, enjoying the sound of his own sonorous voice.

His commandant style of management, he thought, meant that he was being efficient. The problem with his theory, however, was that we all worked remotely and dialed into the call on our cell phones. For all he knew, we could have all been lying in bed, or having a coffee somewhere (the latter of which was most often me).

Perhaps you just know when it’s time to go.

So, after twenty-five years in the communications business, I asked to be set free. The company was once again changing, although this time it wasn’t a merger, but an entire reorganization. The whiney boss retired, and I called my new manager and asked, “When the next RIF takes place, please put me at the top of the list?”

By the end of 2017, I was free, free, free at last! Soon after, my job was outsourced, and the entire business model was revamped.

C’est la guerre!

Retirement’s like a box of choc’lets — ya never know what yer gonna get!

Eight years later, here I sit at my computer with an aching knee, hemorrhoids, and a sore lip that I accidentally bit through eating a salad. But am I complaining? — Well, maybe a little!

After all, aging, as I mentioned, does have some drawbacks!

The wife and I have a pretty little home here on the east coast of Florida. The type that many dream of, while others fear having — when they retire. But you know what? When I consider what we had to endure to get to this place, I could kiss President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s big toe for inventing Social Security and opening a pathway to that most timely exit.