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The receptionist for my office is retired. Friday is her last day. Though I wish her well in whatever endeavors she takes up starting this morning, I also can’t help but hate her a tiny bit. I am so consumed with jealousy over her never having to work again that I can hardly see straight. I can’t wait to retire.

Unlike some crazy people, I don’t enjoy what I do at all. I get out of bed every weekday morning and come in here because I have to if I want to keep a roof over my head and eelskin slippers on my feet. When I was reminded early last week that Ms. Receptionist was retiring, I started thinking about my own retirement and was horrified by the realization that I probably have another forty years of work ahead of me. FORTY. YEARS. That’s longer than I have been alive by a fairly substantial margin, let alone in the workforce.

Being an enterprising young man in the rural Midwest, my first job was a few weeks of summer work, detassling corn at the age of 14. According to the spellchecker in my browser, “detassling” is not a word, but it is most certainly a job. I had to get up bright and early every weekday and get taken to the offices of the grain company I was working for (as being dropped off at a different company’s offices would have been some shoddy parenting). Even though it was the middle of summer, I had to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to keep from getting cut by the corn leaves. Since we started so early in the morning, the plants were soaked in dew at the beginning of the day, which would soak my clothes as I walked the length of that day’s field. The wet sleeves and pant legs didn’t feel too nice in the morning, but I always wished they would stay that way as the sun moved higher and tried to fry me into non-existence. The work was difficult as far as skill was concerned, but it was tiring and kinda gross; every now and then you would find a stretch of corn stalks that were covered in aphids or some other horrible creatures that had to get squished as you took the tassle out. Also, one guy tried to beat me up because I was making fun of one of our bosses. I’m not sure what it had to do with him, but I suspect he was just kind of a prick and was looking for a reason to pick on a scrawny kid he could easily take. Here’s hoping he has since contracted an STD.

I have had too many jobs since then to bother detailing them all, but I can assure you that most of them were crappy and I am glad I don’t hold those positions anymore. Fast food, retail, factory work - you name it, I’ve probably done it. All of which has led me to where I am now, which happens to be another shitty job that I don’t like. So I will continue to count the days until I retire (~14,600 by my estimate) and have days that look like this:

• 6:00 AM - Wake up. Think about getting out of bed.
• 6:04 AM - Get out of bed. Urinate.
• 6:06 AM - Go back to bed.
• 10:30 AM - Wake up. Think about getting out of bed.
• 10:44 AM - Get out of bed.
• 11:00 AM - Eat breakfast.
• 11:20 AM - ? - Whatever the hell I feel like.

With any luck, I won’t have to wait until I’m in my 60’s to retire. Some sort of financial windfall that would make it possible for me to not have to work, even if I had to have a fairly tight budget, means I would stop being a productive member of society as soon as possible. These people you see who win the lottery and then keep their jobs as lunch ladies or assembing hair dryers when they have millions of dollars sitting in the bank are completely out of their minds. I know people want to keep busy, but for Christ’s sake, go travel or something. Keep busy doing something fun. If I won $100 million today, I’d call in dead to work tomorrow and probably drop out of school and just start traveling or coming downtown and paying homeless people to fight each other.

Until then, I’ll be keeping this ergonomic chair warm, staring at the clock, and writing 90%+ of my blog entries. That’s at least one thing I enjoy doing while I’m on the clock.