Rant #3,110: Hold Your Head Up

Well, the rest of my week is shot.

For work, I have to transcribe an interview that the president of the association I work for did with the outgoing director of the commissaries, or military supermarkets.

It is an extensive interview, and while I have worked on it in bits and pieces since late last week, it is tiresome and tedious, and even though I have transcribed more than 3,000 words already, I figure that I am about one-quarter done with this opus, so I still have plenty to go.

And this transcription is being done in and out, with the remainder so the week very busy for me, making it very hard for me simply to sit down and do this thing.

I will do my best—I got an email at about 6 a.m. in the morning today about this—but I already told them that there is probably no way that I can finish this thing this week.

It is just too large, covering too much territory, for me to do completely in a week where I have already been pretty busy.

For instance, today, after I take my son back and forth to work, I have to take my mother to a hearing checkup, which will eat up an extra hour of time on a day where I don’t have much time to begin with.

And on a much lesser note, the curse of the afternoon Yankees game continues.

Every time the Yankees play a day game—like today in Cleveland—the baseball gods work against me, and I have no time to watch much of the game.

You would think that as a retiree—or a semi-retiree, like I am—that I would have the time to watch the game, but once again, I won’t be able to watch any of it, not with this disaster of an interview to take care of.

But such is the life of a retired—or semi-retired—person.

And Congress is talking about scaling back some of the Social Security and Medicare benefits I receive within the next few years, so I have to ask you, will people like me ever be able to be really and fully retired?

We are already double taxed on what we receive from the government, meaning that we are taxed on Social Security like someone who is working is, with taxes taken out of our paycheck when it is originally given to us once a month and then, we have to pay taxes on it come Tax Day.

It doesn’t leave much for us to work with, being that what they give us is a paltry sum, after years of work, to begin with.

Without any real pension, there is no way people like me can have any level of comfort during retirement, so we have to work … and if you think I really enjoy doing what I am doing, I can tell you that about the only thing I enjoy is getting paid, again, once a month, from this little job I have.

I am fortunate to have such a job, and I am not downgrading it at all.

But to force people to work when they are supposedly retired … that is certainly not the scenario I envisioned for myself.

I figured I would retire when I wanted to retire, and take it from there … but it did not happen that way for me, and it still irks me, nearly four years after the fact, that I was told at age 62 that I was done and too old to be working full time.

I was very, very fortunate to get this little job I have when I did—right before my unemployment ran out—and I do the best I can with it.

But it seems to be never enough.

So rather than enjoy my retirement years as so many people do, I have to work and struggle to do the best I can do in an impossible situation, one that I know millions of others are going through too.

When the unemployment numbers have come out recently, they show that most of our population is working, but the numbers are phony, because they do not see people like me. who are working but obviously underemployed.

I should, at this stage of the game, be making anywhere from three to four times what I am making now, salary-wise, if I were doing this job full time, but I do the best I can do.

But I do worry about the future; will I always have to work, into my 70s and 80s, just to keep my standard of living at least near what it was when I was working full time?

I think I got the wrong end of the stick to begin with when I lost my job, and all of those resumes I sent out when I was out of work—more than 1,000 in my estimate—are all in the garbage at this point.

I have looked for full time work on a limited basis during the past many months, but there is simply nothing out there for someone with my background—and more importantly it seems, my age--so again, I guess I am lucky to have what I have.

But when I toil at this interview today and through the rest of the week, over many hours, I have to wonder if it is all worth it.

What and where is my personal pot of gold as I gain a year of age at the end of this month?

I have no idea, and that is what worries me to no end.