Big Announcement (for me, anyway)

I had two fairly momentous days in September this year. First, I reached my 30th anniversary of being hired by [current employer]. Second, my retirement date has been set at December 31, 2025!

Some of you with a well-honed sense of grammar might be confused (or annoyed) with my switch from active voice ("I reached...") to passive voice ("...has been set..."). Good catch! But it wasn't a mistake. Oops, passive voice, again! I said it that way to obfuscate the fact that I didn't make the decision to end my 30 year career with [soon-to-be-former employer].

In fact, pretty much everyone in my development group including my supervisor were given the same news. The group I'm in have been developing, extending, and supporting our programs for upwards of 20 years so the tech is ancient by modern IT standards. I am not surprised by this as it has been wafting around in the ether for a couple years. Replacement applications have been in development for a couple years.

I can't even say I'm shocked by the news. When the company's CTO had my supervisor's supervisor invite all the people working (remotely!) in my area to a mandatory, in-person meeting with no agenda, it seemed that a shake-up was imminent. I even joked that either we were all being laid off or it was a 30th anniversary surprise party for me!

Okay, back to the important topic: me.

I was told (and I think the others were, too) that our jobs were ending on December 31st. I am grateful for the three-month lead time that will give me some time to arrange things. I didn't think they'd do that but I will definitely take it!

I am embracing - welcoming, even - this opportunity, though with some trepidation, obviously. I've been feelin' my age, lately. Serious burnout. I even applied for Social Security last week because I'm eligible to receive it even if I'm still working because I reached full Social Security retirement age.

I would probably have retired at the end of last year had our national nightmare not been re-elected. Now, with Social Security and Medicare under serious threat - and, in fact, on actual hold for the duration of the carelessly and carefully engineered gubmint shutdown - I stayed on the job to have a decent income for as long as possible.

What's next, you ask? Well, at work I'm wrapping up my project and hope to make it so that someone could pick it up and work on it though I really doubt that'll happen. It really is an end-of-life project.

Next, we've got to get our Social Security and Medicare applications finished up. We have no big retirement plans. We'll just keep on keepin' on. Maybe I'll finally get to doing some yardwork and do some Swedish Death Cleaning. I'm definitely doing more reading - I have a long list! I might even play around with computer stuff since it'll be for fun and no longer a busman's holiday.

Anyway, that's the news.

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Written and posted and copyrighted on 2025-10-03 by me. Quote me if you want (linking to this post would be nice, too) but no one and no thing have permission to slurp this into any LLM vomit factory as training data.