Retire and Move to Florida, They Said: Part One, The Covid Years

Photo by Gabriel Vanslette, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I went out to a public square for live music last night. After finding a seat in the bleacher section, I glanced around and thought to myself, look at all these old people. God then handed me a mirror and I settled back into a blue study while contemplating my new neighbors. I wanted to reflect on this seemingly rash decision and how the whirlwind three months that preceded the move brought me here to a retirement community. But first, I had to mentally replay the preceding two years — the Covid years.

In late February of 2020, I arrived back home from speaking at a large cybersecurity conference in San Francisco. I had been to this annual event at least 18 times over the previous 30 years, so this was nothing out of the ordinary. The SARS-CoV-19 virus had just started hitting the news at that time. I had been notified by the conference organizers that one participant (out of about 45,000) had been at the vendor showcase with a case of the Wuhan Flu. We were asked to be careful. Within two weeks, however, my seemingly normal life came to a screeching halt.

My employer decided to use the pandemic as a factor in cutting my position and letting me go. So, I was locked down, isolated, and stripped of gainful employment within a few short days. Nothing would ever be the same.

At first, I tried to carry on as I would have in the past. I went back to the job market, hunting for a ‘new opportunity’ as they say on LinkedIn. I found most employers, colleagues, and friends I reached out to were being overly cautious about taking on new employees: no one was hiring. Companies weren’t sure of how long the lockdowns and remote work would last. The type of work I had performed was mostly executed while traveling on-site at clients or at tradeshows and business events. All that had stopped with two weeks to flatten the curve.

Those two weeks, and then the months that followed, started to drag on. I am an extrovert with a capital E and after a few months of homebound isolation, I felt defeated and lonely. I have a loving and understanding spouse of well over 40 years and she saw the strain. I tried to volunteer to help veterans. The organizations I contacted would only take me if I became an employee so I could be vetted. Would they hire me, even for minimum or no pay? No, they said. Covid, they said.

I tried to parlay my two decades of teaching graduate school at places like the National Cryptologic School and The George Washington University into a job at a local university or community college. Would they hire me as an adjunct to teach, even for free? Nope.

I then turned to civic affairs and offered to serve on town boards and committees. I had been on the planning and zoning board for my local town in Maryland a couple decades ago, so I had some experience. I was told to get in line. Apparently the line is over 20 years long. I should have signed up when I first moved into the area 21 years ago was what the city manager told me. Get in line and we’ll call you if and when we need you.

Do you know what it feels like to have half a century of education and experience under your belt and you can’t even give away your work? I do. And it feels really, really strange. And not in a good way.

I tried to resurrect abandoned hobbies and side interests. I pulled my dusty guitar from the closet and put new strings on it. My wife sent away for some jigsaw puzzles and set them up for me in the lounge. I went for long daily walks and took binoculars to inventory the neighborhood birds. I still held out hope for a new position and sent out a slew of resumes while keeping tabs on my professional network, to no avail.

I belatedly realized my entire social being was centered on my job. I had traveled the globe and had friends and colleagues on nearly every continent. I could be stuck on a long layover in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Santiago, Costa Rica, or even Johannesburg and would know someone to call who would cheerfully open their doors to me. Yet, I didn’t know my next door neighbors in my suburban town beyond a monthly wave of the hand as I went to the mailbox.

Our small cul-de-sac of 21 years was one of strangers. There had been a couple two doors down with whom we exchanged visits and meals on rare occasions, but they had moved away to their retirement home. Bill had retired as an airline captain a couple of years earlier and Lynn decided to sell her large dental practice and invest that money in a new place to live. They moved to a seaside town in South Carolina where they bought a fishing boat.

During a scheduled meeting with my investment broker, our introductory chitchat turned into a therapy session. I laid out my concerns with the loss of income and we used that jumping off point to reevaluate our family financial situation. As we ran the numbers and discussed options, he stopped, looked up at me over his glasses, and said, “Why don’t you just retire like Bill and Lynn did?”

That suggestion came as a total curve ball. Retire? Like, stop working altogether? That just wasn’t me. I had thought about retirement, of course, but I always assumed I would keep a toe in the workforce by consulting, teaching, writing, and even some part time work. But to just walk away?

My in-laws used to always ask me when I planned to retire. Most of them had had state government jobs with generous public sector retirement programs. My father-in-law had been a corrections officer for the state and got in when they still had a 25-year retirement option. He ended up staying a couple extra years, but he was able to comfortably retire in his late 40s and forged an ass imprint into his Lazy Boy, never to work again.

He never did any of those things he talked about before retiring. He didn’t travel, attend concerts or shows, didn’t take up the family truck farm business, nor did he bother with much of anything outside basic home maintenance. He watched a LOT of old westerns and cable news television. So, when he would ask me when I planned to retire, I saw him in the recliner with the remote and replied, “Hopefully, never.”

So, when my broker floated the retire idea, it was as if he recommended I go run off with the circus: it was a foreign concept. But the words had taken hold. I was realizing I was likely no longer employable. Who’s going to take a risk on an old Boomer who could retire? My career had moved on without me. Maybe he had a point.

Next up: Part Two