Jobless for 3,400 Days

I have been jobless for almost 3,400 days now!

That is if you do not count the bottomless "Job Jar" at home and tweaks to our second home, the Tioga. In my working life I never experienced unemployment. I changed careers a couple of times when I was young but always had a new job to go to before I quit the last one. I always knew what I would be doing the next day even though I had little control over it. The last twenty years or so I really did not have a boss.

I, along with everyone else in the Radio Maintenance Department of the Telephone Company, were what evaluators called "Self-Managed". I never found myself in the position of having to ask what they wanted me to do, it was always (sometimes painfully) obvious what had to be done. I had at least one boss who did not actually know what I did for a living and never had the occasion to ask. My job could be described as weeks of tedious boredom (preventative maintenance) interspersed with hours of sheer panic (when something broke and a community became isolated - usually at two in the morning).

One of my partners once said to me, "Croft, nobody ever tells us what to do. A couple of weeks ago I wondered what would happen if I did nothing, so for three days I did nothing. I sat at the workbench and read and puttered. I listened to the radio and went for coffee. The boss came in a couple of times, said hi and left. He never asked me why I was sitting there doing nothing when all my workmates were out doing things. After almost three days I got very bored and found something to do". The rest of us never noticed either. We were all out "Self Starting".

Those great days are now over. Now I have a boss who tries to micro manage me. It is a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.