CSotD: He knows if you are solvent! He knows if you are broke!
Skip to comments
Today's Rhymes with Orange speaks for a lot of us. I'm feeling that Santa had better stay in business, too, given the options out there for the rest of us.
Fortunately, I never figured on retiring anyway. Most writers don't, in part because they can't afford to, even in good times, and in part because other people dream of retiring so they can write. Writers just dream of getting to a point where we can write what we want.
Preferably getting paid for it. Andy Rooney carved out a nice little niche for himself, but there are all sorts of newspaper people doing the same thing on a smaller scale. Granted, the scale is getting smaller than planned.
Yesterday, I went to the post office and found I had five envelopes in my box: Four Christmas cards and a letter from the US Bankruptcy Court informing me that one of my former employers had gone Chapter 11. I opened that one first and it brought me great joy in this holiday season.
This was the company that once sent out an electronic memo demanding of its circulation managers to know what their plans were to duplicate single-copy sales from September 12, 2001 on September 12, 2002. I suggested to my boss that he tell them we were planning to rent a couple of airplanes …
I also suggested to him once that, the next time Corporate demanded to know our goals for the coming quarter, he tell them that we planned to peg our circulation figures to the price of the company's stock, so that if, for instance, they were requiring a five percent rise in circ from us, they'd have to get busy at their end.
Of course, it never happened. The stock plummeted and they all got bonuses, but, meanwhile, the incentives didn't work that way for the rest of us.
I bailed out in January, 2006. The longknives came for him a few months later. We were both much happier for the release, and the stock fell from $40 a share to under a dollar soon after we left.
I'm not claiming a cause-and-effect there, but rather that getting out was not a bad thing. When I had my new job lined up, I wasn't sure how to tell him and my problem was that it didn't start for a month, so I had more than the traditional two weeks to give notice and wasn't sure how that was going to work.
But then one day he called me into his office and made a demand (in response to requirements from HQ) that was so impractical and ridiculous that, instead of answering it directly, I got up and shut the door and told him I had another job and was leaving. And he burst into a broad grin, stood and leaned across the desk to shake my hand and congratulate me on my escape.
Of course, as I often said back then, I had more options: My kids were grown and gone and it was just me and the dogs, and the dogs thought sleeping in the park and eating out of Dumpsters would be a blast.
By contrast, he had kids in high school, his wife was a tenured teacher and his in-laws had moved to town and bought a house to be nearby. Fortunately, he found a really good job that paid more, did not require a move and involved fewer idiotic group memos and (godhelpus) conference calls.
As for me, I'm practicing for retirement. When that day comes, I've got a pension from another newspaper company that I worked for which will add a princely $365 a month to my Social Security, so I'll be living like a king! Or at least, like a writer, which is good.
If there are no more places to sell writing left, however, I do hope Santa will still be in business.
Anyway, retirement is over-rated. I had a professor once tell me that he was jealous that I'd taken a year off from college to write the first draft of a novel. He said he had an idea for a novel that he planned to write when he retired, but I realized he wasn't going to do it, and, unless he wrote awful fast, he didn't, because he died shortly after he quit teaching.
If you're waiting for retirement to pursue your dreams, you're taking one helluva lot more risk than just quitting and going for it now.
Meanwhile, I'm hanging on to this letter from the bankruptcy court, because, while I'm happy enough with it, it's not quite what I wanted, and, once the holidays are over and things have settled down, I'm going to go see if I can exchange it for one the same style and color, but in a Chapter Seven.
Comments
Comments are closed.