Retired!

Yep. Effective March 30, 2012, I will no longer be a member of the working class. Technically, I'll be earning a tiny bit of money on the side (more on that later) but I will no longer have a full-time job. Mentioning this to anyone immediately elicits one or more of the following questions:

Aren't you too young to retire?

I'll be 57 in June. By many standards, that is still young. But my mother died at 60, my father died at 64, and my older brother died at 39. That doesn't mean that I'll die young, but it's not a good family track record. I'm in good health, but I have an erratic heartbeat, a pacemaker, and a body loaded with arthritis. I'm old enough, believe me. Also, after 15 years at McGraw-Hill and 17 years at Bristol-Myers Squibb, I was technically eligible to retire at age 55. I held off as long as I could.

Why are you retiring?

I'm retiring for two reasons. First and foremost, because I can! Marilynn did an incredible job of managing our money over the years. Up until a couple of years ago, I couldn't have told you the difference between a 401(k) plan and a pension. Come to find out, I have two of each! And a bunch of IRA's to boot! Marilynn was pretty sure we were financially set, but we took it to a professional financial guy just to make sure. After looking at our books and discovering that the kids were grown and gone, the house was paid off and that we had zero debt, he told me to retire whenever I felt like it.

The second (and far more important) reason that I'm retiring is because my job stopped being meaningful quite some time ago. It all started with the decision by BMS to outsource their IT function to EDS (now HP). Whether that was a good decision for BMS and its stockholders is irrelevant and not worth arguing about in this blog. But it left me with a job which, over time, I began to detest. The better I did my job, the more pain and suffering I caused to former co-workers who had been outsourced. After four years of dealing with that, it is in the best interest of everyone concerned that I move on.

Aren't you going to miss the challenge?

I will miss the challenge that I had four years ago, managing a staff of IT professionals, but not my current job. I will miss the group of BMS people that I worked with and all of the ex-BMS people who were outsourced, but I won't miss a single member of the HP management team. Not one of them.

What are you ever going to do with all of your free time?

Here's a preliminary list that I put together. I'm sure it will change as I settle into retirement:

• Exercise: Basketball (probably only 2 more years left at most), teaching Spinning class at BMS, weightlifting, and recovering from all of this exercise will absorb a lot of my time.
  
  
  
• Writing: I wrote and published a small book a few years ago and enjoyed the experience. I'm eager to give it another shot with a slightly more complex topic. I'm also going to spend a lot of time with this Blog, revising it slightly to focus on current events.
  
  
  
• Genealogy: I'm the keeper of the Mullen Family Tree. Many of the links on that tree are in dire need of authentication.
  

• Web Programming: I've done a little Javascript programming, but I'm thinking that programs like this need to be updated, probably using this programming environment.

• House Projects: With the kids all gone, there must be a thousand projects that need to be done, starting with painting the picket fence.
  
  
• Environmental Commission: I'm currently the absolute least effective member of the Cranbury Environmental Commission. I'm going to try and change that, possibly even taking a few courses related to Environmental Science.

• Reading: I'm going to shoot for two books a month. After all, I am married to a librarian!
  

Plus, there's always a family function going on: Mulleniums, Mullen Christmases, weddings, graduations, births and, yes, the occasional funerals. And then there are the grandchildren. I only have one now, but I'm expecting more. I can't imagine getting bored!