Going Old School with Clouds When I’m Put Out to Pasture

Hmmm, would you ratherbe in the cloud or gazing at it?

I am now a little undertwo years away from the eligibility to retire. It is not yet a countdown. Butthere is a glimmer of light at the end of the long, long tunnel.

I will concede thatthere are days, when things at work get hectic, that it seems like that lightis on the front of a locomotive hurtling toward me and it is too late to getout of the way.

That disturbing picturenotwithstanding, I feel I can legally permit myself to contemplate the things Iwill not miss when I hang up my keyboard and wave a final farewell to mycolleagues.

I will not miss beingcompelled to learn new, cloud-based applications every six months that areguaranteed to make me more productive. (It may be sacrilegious to state it, butfeel neither the need nor the desire to increase my output.) I willparticularly not miss having to invent new four letter word combinations tovent my frustration.

When I retire I willtake great pleasure in spending hours contemplating real clouds and what theirshapes call to mind, instead of wasting 15 minutes trying to find the damnlogout icon which they keep changing and moving around.

I will not miss tryingto decide which messages I should read first – my e-mail messages, my Skypemessages, my chat messages or my text messages. I particularly will not missreceiving a Skype message asking me if I received the e-mail message that I sawan hour ago and chose to ignore because I do not like the sender.

When I retire I willtake great pleasure in being unavailable for electronic messages in any mediumand delivering an implied message by this very behaviour.

I will not missingscouring the Outlook calendars of half a dozen people searching for that elusiveone hour time slot when everyone is available. I particularly will not miss oneof those six people responds with a counter proposal for a meeting date for ameeting I no longer have the desire to attend.

When I retire I willtake great pleasure in adopting a new outlook on life in which I am unavailablefor meetings of any sort whatsoever regardless of whom else may or may not beavailable despite what their calendar indicates.

Retirement is oftenreferred to as being put out to pasture asif that is a scary thing. It does not scare me in the least. Please, please, put me out to pasture.Make me redundant.

I will take greatpleasure in not being needed and being able to devote my time to cloud-gazingand writing metaphorical stories about what I see.

~ NowAvailable Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: HuntingMuskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is alsothe author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel whichwas a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’swebsite at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .

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