Fact: I will reach my 38th anniversary with the company next Tuesday.

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Whoa! That's unheard of here! Do you get a gold watch? What do you plan to do in your retirement?

Fact: I do have two five-year pins. In Silicon Valley, that's a LONG time to be at any company. And, the last boss I had, I worked for as a personal assistant for the next 18 years. He gave me a joke pin.

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"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want." Calvin & Hobbes

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Hanasian
Annalist, Physician, & Historian
of The Black Company of the Dúnedain,
The Free Company of Arnor
~ ~ ~
Durian: Dúnedain Ranger of the North: Rhudaurian Lineage
- - - -
Roleplay Repository

No, when I reached 25 years it was a month's extra pay (it had been two months earlier, perhaps even three in some distant past), a festivity held in the company - I could choose from two variants, and the rest day off after the festivity.
My (early) retirement is three weeks and one day off. It's a nominal part-time scheme, but the X months really at half time and reduced pay was not an option in the circumstances of 2015 when I opted for the package. Even when it had been an option, very few people ever opted for it. Under this scheme, the total time frame (exit date being the month of one's 63rd birthday) calls for the X months - maximum 60, one had to be 58 to qualify - to be an even number, with one doing full time during the first X/2 months at reduced pay, then the second X/2 months at reduced pay with no time.
While the kind of lifetime employment guarantee reputedly once enjoyed by Japanese companies' employees was never the case to that degree in Germany, at lest with larger companies it was most likely closer to the Japanese model than the American one (but then things were different in the US too, at least up to perhaps the early 1970s ...).
One thing besides different mentalities between Germany and the US may very well have to do with the ease of selling your homes and paying back the open part of the mortgage on them. When you build your own home with a mortgage from the bank here, you sink pretty deep roots in the place you build the home. And also, the banks exact some pretty hefty "early repayment" penalties when you repay the open part of your mortgage here

... this is the place for a quick quiz: who's the bigger criminal, the bank robber or the bank founder? ...

something about their not receiving all that interest which would accrue during the planned duration of the mortgage - all very dubious, to my mind. I mean, they get their money back, they A) are no longer in danger of their "customer" defaulting, and they B) can use the money for other loans. But it may be that what happens when someone defaults on their mortgage may be excessively more bank-friendly here than in the US, but that's just a guess - if one with a bit of justification.

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THAT's a long time!




I'd say, yes.


An interesting way to retire, Gandolorin.


Fact: I worked for an engineering manager at Intel. Our group was designing the 286 and 386 microprocessors.

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"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want." Calvin & Hobbes

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Hanasian
Annalist, Physician, & Historian
of The Black Company of the Dúnedain,
The Free Company of Arnor
~ ~ ~
Durian: Dúnedain Ranger of the North: Rhudaurian Lineage
- - - -
Roleplay Repository

Something I briefly thought of yesterday but forgot by going off on tangents (something I am VERY good at ):
Having been with the company for 38 years also means I have survived generations of CEO's and their ilk (they weren't called that for several decades), management fads (mostly perpetrated by consultants, the three times I was involved with them had me distracted by odd thoughts about pampers diapers), and most of all a degeneration of the company language into what is called Denglish (I am a dual native speaker of German and English and do NOT take kindly to fools who utilize nebulous jargon to disguise that they have nothing to say). A definition of politicians, you say? Well, welcome to some parts of the business world, where private-sector politics (and the most horrendous form of bureaucracy I have ever experienced, our public-sector bureaucrats are often very efficient compared to that soft, brown, smelly substance) can match most of the idiocy of those running for public office.

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Fact: The current company I work for, EDMI Pty Ltd, is, and has been, bringing in various consultants to 'better the business' the last couple years. Having been through it all with my long term U.S. employer, I took notes and wrote out everything I told the first ones. So when the second ones and third ones came along, I grabbed my notebook and educated them on everything I told the previous ones. It is what Gando says about diapers. I however, enjoyed the last consultant a bit more and had no troubles going to her meetings and presentations. I didn't mind assisting in "This collaboration process with EDMI’s Leaders has assisted Cassandra to develop her client relationships skills, further learn about Action Learning projects and gain a greater understanding of how important effective leadership is within a workplace." (from her Linkedin profile)

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Hanasian
Annalist, Physician, & Historian
of The Black Company of the Dúnedain,
The Free Company of Arnor
~ ~ ~
Durian: Dúnedain Ranger of the North: Rhudaurian Lineage
- - - -
Roleplay Repository

We've always said that it starts at the top. It always amazed us that the upper echelons made so much more money than those of us who actually did the work. I left two companies because I was told to do management jobs. I was an administrative assistant, not a manager, and I certainly wasn't paid enough for that kind of responsibility.

One was 3COM. My manager wanted me to do his job while he went to get an MBA. He'd check in once in a while. I feft after three months. The other wanted me to hound the engineers to write up their patents. Gosh, isn't that something a manager does? I'll process the paperwork but I won't manage engineers. I left after three weeks.

(A side note: 3COM had purchased Palm, who built one of the first hand held devices, a Palm Pilot. I remember before it was released a friend who worked in the Palm division had hers at lunch one day. We were eating sushi in their cafeteria. Yeah, one reason the company finally went out of business. Anyway, she told me how she could send me an email from her Palm Pilot. When I got back to my desk in another 3COM building, there was the email! I was really impressed! It was a while later the Pilot was introduced to the public.)

But, I did have several really great bosses. One taught me about the flight patterns in the valley depending on the weather. I was there for six years. And the other gave me many opportunities to learn new things, like going from black and white plastic slides shown on an overhead projector to creating his monthly meetings presentations to his 120 people in PowerPoint, and processing all the company's patents, of which they had several 100. I was with him for 22 years. Both were Engineering Managers, a different breed from Sales or Marketing from what I witnessed.

Gandolorin, I still wonder what you'll be doing in your retirement. I find for us it's all those things we never had time to do when we were working...

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"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want." Calvin & Hobbes

Having been a lifelong bookworm, I will probably read even more than I do anyway. Though getting a library card will probably be a good idea, since our bookcases are nearing overload and we don't really have space for more of them.

Getting my sleep issues resolved will certainly be on the list. As they have led to me gaining weight, which in turn has probably aggravated the sleep issues, using the daylight hours I currently still spend in the office to get out and get some moderate exercise - check on my bicycle's condition, get it fixed up if necessary, and then "munch some kilometers", to translate a German phrase. It's not a mountain bike, called a touring bike here in Germany, with suspension and moderately wide, relatively low-pressure tires, making it ridable in moderate terrain.

And, this is a bit vaguer, travel around Germany a bit. I have seen quite a few cities, towns and regions due to the annual meetings of a group of friends from my "information year" with the company, there have been meetings every year since 1989, the first anniversary. But traveling with my wife would add to that. May also mean switching to rail travel, as I'm not much of a fan of driving on the Autobahn anymore. With over 40 years of experience, my somewhat curmudgeonly impression is that with every year, the percentage of idiots among drivers has increased. Cell-phones and the infotainment-garbage installed in more and more cars aren't helping one bit. Now rail travel is not what one could call cheap, but as my wife and I are both over 60, there may be certain rail-pass schemes offering various discounts which could be interesting.

And last, dear Findë, I have also learned one thing from having been in business administration for 38 years: whoever plans (excessively) simply replaces chance and coincidence with error. "The best-laid plans of mice and men ..."

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Your plans sound wonderful, Gandolorin! Especially the reading and train travel! Sleeping is always good. And napping...

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"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want." Calvin & Hobbes

Gandolorin, I have a suggestion that helped us get out of the house each week. After my husband retired (I retired several years before him), we designated Thursdays as GSDS – "Go Somewhere, Do Something". We didn’t want to look back on our retirement and say, “Gee, what have we done?”, other than the usual twice a year vacations in the islands.

Wednesday nights at dinner, we’d decide where to go the next day. (I am reminded of your comment about planning...). We didn’t want to stay overnight on these ventures. Two hours out and two hours back in one day were pretty much our limit.

We went to a lot of local museums, places like Old Town Sacramento, Monterey, Carmel, and, my favorite, most of the beaches between San Francisco and Big Sur. We made sure it always included lunch.

We did this for several years until we seemed to have seen most everything that interested us close by. We do revisit the beaches every chance I can talk him into it. While I couldn’t live at the beach, I do love visiting it.

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"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want." Calvin & Hobbes

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Hanasian
Annalist, Physician, & Historian
of The Black Company of the Dúnedain,
The Free Company of Arnor
~ ~ ~
Durian: Dúnedain Ranger of the North: Rhudaurian Lineage
- - - -
Roleplay Repository

I'm not sure I understand it myself, Hanasian. Did we ever "Tire" to then "Re-Tire"?

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"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want." Calvin & Hobbes

Since it is one of the words where adding the suffix "ment" turns a verb into a noun, it probably belongs to the pollution to formerly Germanic Old English (AKA Anglo-Saxon) that was caused by those Normans, who had only gotten a rather tenuous grip on the French language since settling in Normandy from Scandinavia, invading descendants of formerly southern neighbors of their own recent ancestors. (And nobody was asking the Celts what they thought of the whole business!)

Anyway, I believe (ancient memories of French lessons) that "tirer" means to pull. But tired is "fatigué", so the tire in retirement has nothing to do with being sleepy.

An OED giving the etymology of "retirement" would be very helpful now ...

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Fact: I still like writing RP tales with other good writers!
(Melanie, Deumeawyn, Moryár, Jax)

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Hanasian
Annalist, Physician, & Historian
of The Black Company of the Dúnedain,
The Free Company of Arnor
~ ~ ~
Durian: Dúnedain Ranger of the North: Rhudaurian Lineage
- - - -
Roleplay Repository