Tag Archives: retire

Flat out thinking…

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There are always stories circulating about people who retire with thousands of hours of sick leave on the books. That’s good for them. 3000 hours of sick leave gives you a hell of a lot of credit towards your total years of service. As great as that sounds, I know I’m not going to be one of those people. I’m not an iron man. I don’t play hurt when I can avoid it and I don’t go in when I’m hacking up a lung. For one thing, I know that I don’t bring my A-game when I’m sick or hurt and for another it only seems decent not to wander in and infect everyone else with whatever crud I happen to have come down with. This week has been an object lesson in the former; a great primer for why I avoid playing hurt.

It really boils down to a matter of concentration and focus. When part of my brain is focused on just how damned uncomfortable I am, I’m not doing my best work. Chances are, I’m not even doing good work. I’ll probably never get nominated for employee of the quarter with that attitude, but it is what it is. One of the key lessons I’ve learned on the job is if you don’t look out for yourself, there’s no one else going to take the time to look out for you either. Long story short, yesterday’s post talked about the inevitable guilt that goes along with the sick day. I had plenty of time after writing that post to put some real thought into it – since laying flat on the floor isn’t good for much else than giving you time to think. It’s safe to say that after really reflecting on the last decade, I’m utterly cured of whatever misguided guilt I was feeling for staying put and taking care of me.

The job is happy enough to chew you up and grind you down. It’s your job to do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen. Here endeth the lesson.

Out to pasture…

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The reliability of my venerable Late 2008 MacBook Pro has reached such an unfortunate state. Despite my best efforts at salvaging the situation, it is time to retire the poor, battered contraption. Assuming all goes to plan, this will be the last post from an aged, and increasingly temperamental machine.

As much as I love new tech, parting company with this first of the aluminum unibody Mac laptops is bittersweet. You see, it comes with history. Or at least some personal history.

The first computer I ever used was an Apple Macintosh. There were six of them squirreled away apple_macintoshin a back room of the library at George’s Creek Elementary in the mists of pre-history (AKA the mid-1980s). I was probably all of eight or nine years old. We eventually added one at home too – my entry into having a real “personal” computer. That little beige box met all of the household’s computing needs for almost a decade.

The year was 1995. Enter Windows. I got my first Compaq desktop and never looked back. I was a committed Windows user from there on – building a series of progressively more powerful machines. That lasted for more than a decade of upgrades, new towers, and laptops until finally it ended with a puff of acrid smoke from the back of a Gateway laptop on March 20th, 2009.

Apple lured me back, not with a computer, but with a phone. I was so enamored with the engineering prowess in that first iPhone that I thought surely they know how to build a computer. And they did. The machine I’m typing this on outlasted generations of new computers, three major OS upgrades, and in almost five years didn’t so much as hiccup on anything I asked it to do. Right up until the point where it started choking on everything, of course.

Like every other bit of electronic kit, my ’08 model has reached a point in its service life when it is simply uneconomical to repair. In the finest tradition of American consumerism, I will therefore shunt it unceremoniously aside in favor of a newer, shiner model. But I won’t do it without posting one last blog from the machine that brought you every single word ever published on jeffreytharp.com, two ebooks, and spewed snarky commentary from one end of the internet to the other. It deserves at least that much for its years of good and faithful service.