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My Final Days of Work
5–4–3–2–1 — Blast Off!
Just as the SpaceX Dragon was preparing to blast off earlier this week, I, too, am preparing to blast off into retirement. My final day of teaching is Tuesday June 2, and as I look back over my career, I see five distinct phases.
Summer Work in a Factory. The first job where I actually had to work a full eight-hour day occurred during the summer of 1968, just before my senior year of high school. I can vividly recall waking up at 6:00 every morning, well before anyone else in the house, to get dressed and eat breakfast and, then, walk to my job as a fork lift. No, not a fork-lift operator, an actual fork lift. My job was to carry boxes of supplies to various people in the factory who would shape those supplies into plastic products (such as dolls or other toys) or add parts to the basic shells. Later, I would return to the various stations to pick up the finished products and load them onto train boxcars at the rear of the building. The work — from 7:00 am to 3:30 pm — was hot and dirty and persuasive; it persuaded me that I did not want to return to factory work ever again, and I definitely needed to attend college.
