Hmmm, would you rather be in the cloud or gazing at it?
I am now a little under two years away from the eligibility to retire. It is not yet a countdown. But there is a glimmer of light at the end of the long, long tunnel.
I will concede that there are days, when things at work get hectic, that it seems like that light is on the front of a locomotive hurtling toward me and it is too late to get out of the way.
That disturbing picture notwithstanding, I feel I can legally permit myself to contemplate the things I will not miss when I hang up my keyboard and wave a final farewell to my colleagues.
I will not miss being compelled to learn new, cloud-based applications every six months that are guaranteed to make me more productive. (It may be sacrilegious to state it, but feel neither the need nor the desire to increase my output.) I will particularly not miss having to invent new four letter word combinations to vent my frustration.
When I retire I will take great pleasure in spending hours contemplating real clouds and what their shapes call to mind, instead of wasting 15 minutes trying to find the damn logout icon which they keep changing and moving around.
I will not miss trying to decide which messages I should read first – my e-mail messages, my Skype messages, my chat messages or my text messages. I particularly will not miss receiving a Skype message asking me if I received the e-mail message that I saw an hour ago and chose to ignore because I do not like the sender.
When I retire I will take great pleasure in being unavailable for electronic messages in any medium and delivering an implied message by this very behaviour.
I will not missing scouring the Outlook calendars of half a dozen people searching for that elusive one hour time slot when everyone is available. I particularly will not miss one of those six people responds with a counter proposal for a meeting date for a meeting I no longer have the desire to attend.
When I retire I will take great pleasure in adopting a new outlook on life in which I am unavailable for meetings of any sort whatsoever regardless of whom else may or may not be available despite what their calendar indicates.
Retirement is often referred to as being put out to pasture as if that is a scary thing. It does not scare me in the least. Please, please, put me out to pasture. Make me redundant.
I will take great pleasure in not being needed and being able to devote my time to cloud-gazing and writing metaphorical stories about what I see.
~ Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet
~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .
~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go Hmmm at its’ internet home www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog2. Instructions for subscribing are provided in the Subscribe to this Blog: How To instructions page in the right sidebar. If you’re reading this post on another social networking site, come back regularly to my page for postings once a week
Tags: cloud gazing · clouds · in the cloud · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · out to pasture · retirementNo Comments