What’s this? A blog post? After all this time?
It is indeed.
For want of a better word, I have retired. My former employer, the State of Arizona had (before they ruined it for newer employees) a fairly liberal retirement annuity program. To be fully vested for retirement you simply needed a combination of 80 “points,” Points were defined as a combination of your age and your years of service. For me, that came late last year when the conjunction of my age, 53, and my years of service, 27, came together to create magic.
What was that magic? Well, it was the magical ability to give no more fucks about shit going on at work.
No more fucks about their ham-fisted and transparent attempts to consolidate Information Technology services and staff downtown with another agency; no more fucks about forcing us all on Google’s G-Suite because they tried to play hardball with Microsoft and failed; no more fucks about IT security remediation; no more fucks about packing up our agency and moving it downtown to grotty building, with half the space, no walls and not a damned place to eat worth a crap for miles; no more fucks for their cult of business management which ignores qualitative outcomes in favor of quantitative ones; and no more fucks for an executive branch that replaces a qualified, competent and high-performing Director simply because she refused to put an R next to her name instead of an I.
No more fucks given.
[Next time, we’ll talk about what comes next.]