Been on the forum here for years but just discovered this thread. I'm not sure when I exactly retired, 'cause I been bummin' all my life. Worked full time for a couple years in the late 60s then quit and bummed around, took some college courses, and got a summer job driving semi for Continental Baking in '78. Got laid off every winter and thus got to bum around every winter for a few years until an old timer retired and I was forced into full time employment. That made me sorta defiant so I kept the bosses ticked off until the day one of them forced my exit by throwing a desktop decoration at me. So I got to enjoy the early 90s bummin' again interupted by seasonal temping at the Postal Service and UPS, and with unemployment checks in between I never had to dip into my savings. Then Continental's lawyers settled up by gifting me a few dollars and a whole lotta pension credits, and the Postal Service forced me into full time. Turned 50 with the new Millenia and now fully realized that work was becoming increasing optional... So I got defiant again and actually tried to move the mail, which ticked off some managers who had other priorities no end. The first of them got well advanced in building the case to fire me (go ahead, make my day...) when he must have decided I had the right idea, took a year off for mental health reasons, then came back to work for a few days, threw out the whole case against me, and retired himself! Thus it fell to an underling newly promoted to management who had a somewhat checkered career himself to spend a year building the case against me with the enthusiastic assistance of the rest of the managers who felt the highest and best use of a Postal Service vehicle is storage rather than actually moving mail. So they suspending me in fall 2005 pending discharge, and before they got through all the procedures to finally fire me I became eligible for retirement, turned in my paperwork, and put to waste the couple years they'd wasted trying to fire me!
While suspended from the Postal service and for a couple years after I temped at UPS every fall until the recession hit and I bowed out to let some young folks have the work. Between that and unemployment I never had to touch my savings, and in 2008 they reduced the early retirement penalty on my Teamster pension from Continental so I started drawing on that. So the only "work" I do now is volunteering and my own "projects". Which leaves me plenty of time to put 51,000 miles on My S10 in four years in Minnesota, as well as a few thousand more miles on my other bkes and the pair of Airhead BMWs in Florida!
The only problem is, I'm in rapidly changing high tech, so after 3 years everything is practically unrecognizable.
