Where’s Nico?

I am wrapping up my career this Friday. I’m super excited to retire but I will say, I found a lot about my job to be fun – I got to work with some really wonderful folks. The other day, I sent out an email to a bunch of them to say goodbye, and I included some rambling thoughts about realizing you’ve turned into an old man seemingly overnight. I gave a list of five interesting things about being old enough to retire – I figured I’d share the list here too. So without further ado…

Five Interesting Things About Being Old Enough to Retire:

So I ‘semi-retired’ last March, and have been working part time since then.  That has let me sort of dip my toe into retired life.  I have to say, this may surprise you but it turns out that not working is even more fun than working!  There are some real perks to being an old guy.  Did you know once you hit 55, T-Mobile counts you as a ‘senior’ and you can get a senior phone plan for like half the cost of your old plan?  I can only assume it’s because T-Mobile figures I’ll soon be like my mom and not know how to even turn my cell phone on, so the cost of having me be on their network will be pretty low.  There’s just a lot of cool things about being old – here are five of them that I thought I’d share:

1. Doing things you used to do at night, but at a time where everyone else is working

Well sure, one perk of not working is it definitely frees up a lot more drinking time, but there are a ton of other cool things about having your days free.  I love getting to do my grocery shopping during “senior hours” – like late mornings on a Thursday.  There is a fraction of the number of people there at that hour, although I must admit, those who are at the store do push their carts a bit slower at that time of day, so it does cut down a bit on the time savings.  It’s way easier to take care of things at the DMV or getting your dental appointments in or whatever.  In theory, all this extra time would let me go to the gym when it’s less crowded to improve my health or swing by the library to expand my mind, but in reality, who am I kidding – this is mostly about the day drinking.

2. Realizing you are completely out of touch with today’s world and you don’t care

(Nothing says “out of touch” like a photo of Hall and Oates in what I guess in hindsight was their heyday?) 

The halftime show at the Super Bowl featured Usher.  I’ve heard the name ‘Usher’, I’m aware of the fact that there is a musician named Usher… I can’t name a song by Usher.  Until the Super Bowl halftime show, I’m pretty sure I had never seen him before.  The halftime show let him bring up a bunch of other musicians, and I didn’t know any of them.  I’d love it if any of them were named ‘Valet’, ‘Ticket Scanner’ or ‘Concessions Guy’.  At some point, Usher was on roller skates and I turned to Kristen and said “I think that guy’s on roller skates” and immediately realized that statement sounded exactly how my grandfather would have reacted had he been watching the performance.  At some point during the game, they mentioned that the show featured songs from Usher’s 25 year long career, so I’ve been out of touch for much longer than I had realized.  Oh, and by the way, his name is “Usher” not “The Usher”, as I discovered when I was corrected for misstating this.  It reminded me of my kids, when they were younger, having to explain to me that multiple Pokemon are not Pokemen.  When I made that error, my kids looked at me like I had a second head growing out of my neck.

Taylor Swift is kind of the same to me – prior to the whole Travis Kelce thing, I was aware there is a singer named Taylor Swift, and I assume I’ve heard songs that she’s done at some point, but I couldn’t name any.  When I first heard that Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was Taylor Swift, I figured it was a story from the Onion – but it turned out it was true.  I asked my buddy if she had negotiated a lasting Middle East peace plan or something, but I guess she was person of the year because she went on a concert tour.  I didn’t realize that was uncommon – don’t most professional musicians do concert tours?  Also, even if I found their person of the year choice odd, I was happy to discover there is still a Time magazine – I haven’t seen one of those in years.

But in the end, none of this remotely bothers me.  I like being out of touch, and the feeling of amusement I get when someone tries to explain to me what an “influencer” is, or tells me about the latest dance craze on the Ticks and Tocks, or whatever.  (What’s that?  Oh, it’s just “TikTok”, not “the Tick and Tocks”?  But shouldn’t it at least be TickTock?  I mean – what harm did the letter ‘c’ commit that justified it’s expulsion?)

3. Being able to tell “back in my day” stories

I dearly love this – to me, “back in my day” stories (i.e. the “back in my day” stories, from back in MY day) always involved World War II food rations or multiple mile walks to and from school in massive snowstorms or things like that.  Now, I get to be the one telling “back in my day” stories, and it can just be about using dial up modems to connect to the internet or having to “rewind” a movie after you watched it or else you’d get charged a buck.  Seriously – back in my day, the way you ‘streamed’ a movie was you drove over to a box store full of these plastic boxes, walked around looking at thousands of the plastic boxes until one of the boxes had a picture of a movie you could all agree on watching, drove back home, set your TV to channel 3 (yes, we numbered our channels – we didn’t call them just ‘Netflix’ or ‘Hulu’), pop the plastic box-shaped item that was inside the original plastic box you started with into this metal box thing, hit the play button to watch the fairly low resolution movie, and then, before getting the plastic box-shaped item out of the metal box and putting it back into the other plastic box with the picture and driving back to the box store and putting the plastic box-shaped item that was in the other plastic box into a big metal box, you had to hit the ‘rewind’ button on your home metal box device and wait for a couple of minutes so that this thing was ready to show the movie from the start again.  Some marketing geniuses made us all feel guilty if we didn’t do this by coming up with the phrase “be kind, rewind”, which taken in reverse seemed to be the same as saying “don’t rewind, then you are a jackass”.

(bonus points to anyone who gets this reference!)

But I digress, as I am often prone to do.  I simply love the confusion on people’s faces when I explain that we used to, as a society, successfully find our friends at baggage claim in an airport without smart phones, like we had some form of ESP or something.

4. Some people equate being old with being wise

There’s something about getting older that just makes you feel more comfortable in your own shoes.  Part of that is probably as you get old, you start buying really, really comfortable and ugly shoes (along with some shorts that let me show off my black knee high socks). 

Maybe because old people look comfortable, others just assume they know what they’re talking about.  The truth is, it’s not at all that you are smarter – it’s that you just don’t care that much.  If I knew I was getting under your skin because I called it “the Tick and Tocks”, I’ll probably double down even if I know I’m wrong – because why not?  I have all day!  You can look at your watch all you want, but I don’t need to be anywhere at any time ever again.  I don’t think other old people will like me fessing up that we actually have no clue what we’re doing, but as the world rapidly expands, I feel like I know less as a percentage of it every day – and every day I also feel less troubled by that fact.  I made it this far with what I’ve got for a brain, so I suppose it’s good enough to get me through whatever conversation I’m in at the time.

5. The ability to shame others

I had a friend who had a rather challenging grandmother.  Every year, the grandmother would guilt her family into coming to her place for Thanksgiving “because this could be my last Thanksgiving”.  She overplayed her hand – finally her grandkids just started telling her “don’t worry Grandma – you’re too mean to die”.  I haven’t overplayed my hand to that point, to my knowledge.  But I like that if someone isn’t keeping up with me when it comes to drinking beer or going for a bike ride or whatever, I get to shame them by reminding them that I’m a fifty five year old man.  I am turning myself into my own living, breathing Mendoza line.

6. I tell stories without ever getting to the point

Ha!  Not only do I find myself forgetting the point of my story, but I’ll drag out a story even longer in hopes that if I keep on rambling long enough, the original point will come back to me.  Those who know me know that I can get a bit long-winded, to say the least.  To prove the point, I figured I’d just go ahead and list out six things in my top five list of great things about getting old.

Ken 3/5/24