I am going to put aside all my personal challenges in life for this post. What I am going to talk about is something that will likely happen to almost all of us after we “retire”.

The last four years of my corporate employment life were the most fruitful and enjoyable of my thirty-year career. I finally managed to find where I should have been all along. The major problem with discovering that earlier is that I was born 20-years too early.

When I started my corporate life in 1970, calculators were just coming on the scene and computers were in massive atmospheric conditioned rooms containing hundreds of 24 inch reels of tape constantly spinning. I did take a computer course in college, but that proved to make computer science less than stimulating as a career objective. I spent many hours writing code on paper in a strange language called FORTRAN. Then there was the task of typing all those lines of code in a machine that punched holes in cards for the computer to read. After the cards were submitted, it was a matter of waiting up to 8 hours to see if it ran as intended. It rarely did the first time, usually because of a typo on just one card.

Like I said, I was born 20-years too early. If I had graduated in 1990, I would quickly been exposed to PCs and possibly a thing called an Apple computer at the age of twenty-two, instead of forty-four. I think you get the point.

My talents in software development were finally being recognized, during those last four years. I was leading a group that developed software apps that saved the company mucho bucks. My tools were enthusiastically accepted by the 300-person engineering organization that I was serving.

And then came the “official” retirement process of turning in my ID badge and the keys to my office.

Another part of that retirement that I didn’t realize at the time was I was expected to take all the knowledge I had acquired over those 30-years, and drop it in a leaky bucket on the way out the door.

Once you put the “retirement” label on, nothing more is expected of you, but most, maybe build model trains in your basement for the rest of your life. “You are retired now, so leave everything up to us who are still working.” Of course, most of us think we can continue to contribute to life on this earth. But, that is not how the people on the other side of the divide see it.

It’s a shock for each of us to learn, and I am still learning it twenty-three years later. Here in my RetCom, I think I have some valuable ideas that would make this place better for all of us. But, I kinda get the feeling that when I talk about them, they are mostly discarded as the ravings of an old man. Yeah, I am probably being unfair in this example, but…