Forced Into Early Retirement, and I am not a Government Worker

My boss scheduled a “2025 Planning Meeting” for the second week of January.  I wanted to take it from the car as a conference call, but he wanted a Teams Meeting, so I assumed at the time he needed to show slides.

I called in, and in sitting in a Brady Bunch montage on the Team call was my boss, the CEO, a regional EVP and two HR representatives.  I knew immediately this was a layoff call.

I was magnanimous about it, although it was a chickenshit move to ambush me like that.  I have been laid off before, and the last time my boss gave me a head’s that a layoff-list was being made, that he would try to keep me off it, but he didn’t think he would be successful.  That allowed me to get my ducks in a row and not be ambushed, and I greatly appreciated the gesture.

This time I was treated no better than the junior engineers that also got the axe.  About 10% of the staff was cut, including shutting down all the overseas offices (I ran the US office for this Kraut company).  The 90% rump company remaining in Germany is getting absorbed into the larger parent German company, and this subdivision’s products tabled.

Originally the plan was for the overseas offices to merge over to the parent company as well, but the Germans are getting panicked about their economy and decided to make cuts.  Europeans are not risk takers, and in the end the layoff decision is not surprising as Germany slides further into economic and cultural irrelevance.  The decision all happened before the end of the year and US politics were not a factor any more than the Korea, China and other offices that were shuttered had any influence from their politics.

I was already planning my retirement in 3-4 years, so this move just accelerated those plans.  I told them point blank on the call that “I don’t have to work, I work because I want to,”, which is a 100% true statement.   And while I will certainly miss the cash flow from an emotional standpoint, it isn’t required to maintain my lifestyle.

But I then got the most insulting comment on the call: “We can give you a good reference!”.  Gee, thanks, I am sure there are TONS of jobs waiting in tech for a 50-something business development guy, and your recommendation is going to make all the difference in the world!

My chances of getting another job at a medium-to-large tech company at my age are zero to none.  I just might be able to get into a start-up if I know any of the principles personally, but no one my age is starting companies anymore.  There is an outside chance someone will toss me a consulting bone here or there, but that is the best I can hope.

So realistically my career in tech is over.  I am playing the game of tossing my resume out there and updating my LinkedIn, but by the end of this year I know I will just give up and put “Retired” on my LinkedIn page.

And then what will I do for the next 30 years of my life?  I have pondered that a bit before, and my concern is not money but boredom as I go through these last decades. 

One Reason Old People Don't Update Their Stuff

Walk into an old person’s home and chances that it feels old: old furniture, old decor, old everything.  I used to think that it was because once you get old you don’t care about keeping up with things, or maybe you don’t have money to keep updating stuff, or maybe you don't want to spend money again on something you already updated when you were younger.

Now I realize there is another reason old people don’t update their stuff: they don’t realize how fast time is passing.  I ran into this exact experience with my home WIFI network of all things.

I spent a lot of time putting in a mesh WIFI network into my home in 2018.  I got it working, then pretty much forgot about it.  When I turned on my home devices, they got internet.  If I got a new  gadget, I hooked it up to the network and it worked.

Now 2018 doesn’t seem too long ago (to me), but it is SIX years ago, over 2,000 days.  When I was a kid six years took forever, and I got not one, but two college degrees in six years, which also seemed to last forever when I was a young adult.

And in tech, six years is definitely a huge amount of time, and during that time WIFI got updated, faster, could go further, and so on.   Time had passed me by, and I didn’t even know it since to me in my 50s, six years now seems like six months.

I would have still been oblivious about my ancient WIFI system but I ran across an online bandwidth tester, tried it out and saw it was much lower than the big number that my cable company justifies for their ever increasing monthly rate.  So I spent a whopping $200 at Amazon for a new system and took all of ten minutes to upgrade my home network.  My home network is now five times faster than it was, with a noticeable improvement in buffering and latency.

Now this was cheap and easy to do, so it was not about money or technical ability.  It just never occurred to me how much time had passed since I installed it.  If you had asked me when I put in my WIFI system I would have said it felt like a year or two ago.

So I was getting old inside my house and not even knowing it, which I now realize happens to a lot of old people.  They are just fine with what is going on inside their house, they just don’t realize how fast time is passing outside of it.

 

You Can’t Bequeath Kindle Books

 After my dad passed away I had to go through the mess that was his office.  Buried in one of his desk drawers was my mother’s iPad.  She passed away in early 2022, so her vintage 2018 iPad sat buried in a drawer for two and a half years.

Thinking I might be able to Ebay it for $50 I re-powered the battery and booted it up and spent all of one minute cracking the pass code using her birthday.  Once I was in I found my dad did delete her email before throwing it into a drawer, but he didn’t delete her Kindle ap.

Kindle was still was linked her unused Amazon account (separate from my Dad’s) and has over 100 books, a treasure trove of reading that she would have paid over $1K from the time she started migrating from paper to electronic around 2012.  The problem is how to get $1K of content off the old $50 iPad over to MY iPad?

Turns out that when you buy an ebook, you don’t own it.  You only are getting a license to use it untilyou die.  That’s right, ebooks and similar content cannot be passed down or transferred, so I can’t tell Amazon I am the rightful heir and to send that $1K of ebooks my way post haste.  In fact, if you tell Amazon someone is dead and prove it they will clamp down their account right quick.

The obvious way around this would be to pretend she is still alive, log into her Amazon account, and put me on “family sharing”, which is how you normally share ebooks in a household.  I luckily found her old Amazon password on a piece of paper in another drawer, which sat idle for the past two and a half years.  The bad news is after 2.5 years without activity Amazon wants two-factor proof for me to log in, and both the email and phone that are on her account were shut down long ago. 

I could try to social engineer Amazon Support into updating her account with a new email and phone (and over the phone is the only way to do this), or I could just use her old iPad as a reader until I get through her content.

Before deciding what to do I went through the content and deleted anything I already read, which removed over two dozen books (mostly books we recommended to one another, so makes sense).  Looking at what was left, turns out her tastes were a bit different from mine.  The remaining library is a good 2/3 police procedurals, which I might grab for a plane flight, but otherwise find boring (same story over and over).  The remaining 1/3 has a few novels which look interesting, but in the end it is definitely not the full $1K in content I was originally expecting.

At the end of the day I will skip trying to cheat my way past Amazon and just keep the iPad as a reader until I get through the books I want to read, then finally get rid of it.  By the time I sell the old iPad its value will be less than the $50 it is worth today, but I will make up for that by reading a few books off it.

YouTube Category “Scantily Clad Women Playing Piano”

I (re)started playing piano ten months ago as a hobby.  My mother made me take lessons as a kid, which I hated, then half a century later I tried it again and was like “Wow, I really enjoy this, why didn’t I do this sooner?”  My second thought is “How good can I get before I die?” 

My main interest is classical, so right now I am working on – count ‘em – four Chopin pieces.  Some YouTuber I was watching early in my hobby said “Every serious piano student has a special relationship with Chopin”, which I thought “yeah, whatever”, then three months later I was going OCD on Chopin.

My main piano teacher is Mr. YouTube, which carries just an amazing array of teachers.  Whatever your style, musical interest, or main learning method, there is someone out there making videos for you (usually with a come-on to subscribe for custom content or remote lessons).  What I really like is pulling ideas and techniques from multiple people: this guy had a great comment that made my mind “click” on chord inversions, that gal has an interesting technique for fingering, etc.  And when I get stuck on something simple (two handed fingering for the non-standard B-flat scale), there is always a video with the answer.   I think a lot of my quick progress is having this wide an access to teachers and techniques instead of just old, tired Mrs. Lassiter when I was seven.

Since YouTube is feeding me piano lessons and techniques, it started feeding me similar subjects like “Scantily Clad Women Paying the Piano”.  Now, I get why these are out there.   For men, having an almost naked women playing beautiful music in the background while you relax is practically a Jungian archetype.  I just find the existence of the content amusing and wonder if the audience is music nerds who need eye candy, or people who are looking for eye candy and put up with the classical music.

For the record the performers are talented, and I give them extra marks for being able to concentrate with high drafts.

My guess is the audience is just lonely male musicians as there are plenty of other YouTube topics that throw in babes.  Case in point is there are a bunch of “Home Repair Do It Yourself” videos that instead of having Bob or Frank walk you through how to replace a water heater, it is instead a woman in a bikini.  And if a guy has to watch a YouTube video of something, why not add some eye candy?