I am now within 18 months of retiring. I know how to go to work every day. But how do you go to work every day when you know there aren’t many more days?
“The only dedication for us is art and life. And this office has nothing to do with either of them.”
Friend, co-worker, Beat poet, and musician Andy in 1978 at the Boston Garden.
As the days dwindle down to a precious few and the Boomers become an answer blowing in the wind (of the 68 people I currently work with, only six of us were born between 1946 and 1964, and at least one of us is in the closet), I intend to share my irreplaceable worklore with you rookies who are still figuring out how to commute/in a three-button suit/with that weary executive smile.
My favorite things about working
- Getting paid
- Free food
- Sleeping under my desk
- All those color copiers
- Three-day weekends
(My favorite thing about working at the Boston Garden was skating on the rink at lunchtime if they were set up for a hockey game that evening.)
My least favorite things about working
- Arriving, sitting for eight hours, leaving
- Meetings
- Emergencies caused by morons
- Corporate America’s love affair with jargon
- Knife fights
More bulletins to come from this undiscovered country. Here’s an old bulletin from a job I don’t even have anymore.
“Don’t count the days. Make the days count.” (Muhammad Ali)
And now:
Index to Year 8 of Run-DMSteve!
Farewells
Antique Parent Land
Money (that’s what I want)
Music
Why I don’t listen to what I don’t listen to
Lounge against the machine (chapter 1)
Chess
The most boring world chess championship ever begins
The most boring world chess championship ever ends
Misc.
Random Pick of the Day
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Fellow liberals! It’s our duty to go to Washington, D.C., and dance outside AOC’s office!
Random Pan of the Day
Pirate Radio (2009)
An above-average cast walks the plank in a below-average movie. In 1966, unlicensed radio stations aboard hulks in the North Sea provided citizens of Great Britain with their regular daily dose of rock ’and’ roll. Aboard the good ship Radio Rock, there are 10 men (and one woman) who live and breathe their music. They play rock 24 hours a day. But they never talk about it. They never mention a band or a song or a quote from a song. There are no disagreements about music. There aren’t even any agreements.
Richard Curtis, who wrote Pirate Radio, forgot that his characters are living in the middle of the most tumultuous decade in the history of pop. In 1966, every song these DJs played was a small miracle, but to Curtis, the music is just background noise. It’s Classic Rock.
If the cast had not been so appealing, I never would’ve stayed till the end when the ship sank and the DJs were rescued but the crew disappeared and no one thought to ask about them. How stupid do these moviemakers think we are? Really stupid – after all, we elected Trump.
With Sir Kenneth Branagh as the Monty Python bureaucrat, Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the character he played in Almost Famous, Bill Nighy as something, Gemma Arterton as The Girl, January Jones as The Girl, a boatload of girls as The Girls, Emma Thompson as The Girl of a Certain Age, and Ike Hamilton as the Black Man Who Is Not Permitted to Speak. Two hours. Not subtitled, but should be.
Run-DMSteve 
Ah, end of May. But, hey, we don’t love you for your mathematical wizardry!
Dr. D, you big dummy. If I want to know a number, I’ll ask Alexa. The point is, you have fewer than 70 days to go. As my Grandma Bella often said, usually about something I had accomplished that she didn’t think much of but applicable to your situation as well, “That’s nothin’!”
I have 70 working days until I retire (early with the help of COBRA). It is so hard to act like I care. But I do have to act since I can’t tell the Corporation that I am going to retire. I can’t even think of five things……
Two of the qualities I like best about you, Dr. D, are your sunny disposition and your ever-present optimism.
The first thing on your list of five things is the 70 working days you have left. That’s easy time. You could do that standing on your head with one hand tied behind your back. People in the American gulag of for-profit prisons (which is about how you feel right now) would kill to be that short.
You’ll have the 70-day project done by the end of April. If my count is correct, your last day will arrive during the week of April 22. This year, that week is one of the most auspicious on the calendar! April 22 is Earth Day and Easter Monday in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. April 25 is ANZAC Day. April 26 is Arbor Day. And the whole week is PASSOVER! (I absolve you from the task of trying to digest matzoh.) The stars have aligned for the beginning of your retirement.
And then you can forget everything, Dr. D: Newton’s 13 laws, including his thoughts on how to meet girls, centripetal acceleration, efficiency, angular velocity, angular anything, everything to do with gasses and fluids, most of which are yucky, expansion, displacement, the deserted intersection where magnetism meets electricity, and all that weird shit with kinetics. The absorbed dose and the effective dose of work will cease to mean anything. The only datum you should care about now, Dr. D, is escape speed.
Good luck, concentrate on one day at a time, savor the whistle when it blows at 5, and if you can smuggle a fax machine out of the building you might be able to get something for it on eBay.