“You work too much”
It’s a phrase I hear all the time. From my wife, from my friends, from my mother, from my boss. And I will be the first to admit that I am a workaholic. Unfortunately, I have a position that makes it very easy to feed that addiction. There is always some sort of news happening. Just last night, I was submitting travel forms to the Turks and Caicos government on one computer screen while streaming the Oshkosh School Board meeting on another screen. And in between uploads of documents, I was filling out my employees’ annual reviews. All of this after spending 11-hours in the office.
The pandemic just made my inability to stop working even worse. I was one of the few people allowed to work in-person when we moved to DEFCON 1 here at the Radio Ranch in March of 2020–so duties usually assigned to a bunch of people were redistributed among the lucky “Quarantine Crew”. I heard from a number of listeners wondering why they were hearing me “all the time” on WHBY–and “don’t you ever go home?” It’s not quite as bad anymore–but you do still hear way too much of me.
To make matters worse, the things that I enjoy doing outside of my “assigned duties” are really just more work. I did play by play for three high school playoff basketball games in the space of 26 hours last weekend. There are weeks during the winter and spring where I officiate or umpire 2 or 3 high school basketball or softball games. And then there is volunteer “work”. Even when it came to making some food for a charity event last month, I choose a dish that required 14-hours to make.
I used to think that I was somewhat unusual in my desire to always be “doing something”–but it turns out that I am not. The proliferation of the internet and smartphones has created a culture for some that they are never “off the clock”. If I didn’t turn down the sound of my phone at night, it would be a constant ring of tones alerting me to a serious crash somewhere, or bad weather advisories, or some new war atrocity being committed by Russia, or Giannis having another huge night for the Bucks.
But starting next week, I will be on vacation. And for the first 5 days of that vacay I will be in a foreign country. Now, there is cellular service and internet available there–but to access it, I would have to pay $10 a day. And being on the Dave Ramsey plan, is checking my email and getting calls from scam marketers worth it? I think not. So I am just going to leave the phone in airplane mode–and deal with everything when I get back to the States.
I always treat my winter getaway as a “test run” for my retirement. I like to think that all of the hours I’m putting in now to achieve an early retirement will be worth it when I’m in the gated golf community and I don’t have to pay attention to anything going on in the outside world. But I know deep down I still won’t slow down. For the past 11-years my folks have been retired and quite honestly, I have no idea what they do all day. They live on a golf course–but neither of them play golf. The community in which they reside for the winter has over 100-clubs and groups–but they belong to none of them. The only people they know down there are the folks in the houses right next to theirs. They joke that it takes “a lot of work to keep up the house and the yard” but all day every day?
I would probably know what they do all day but I’m never around even when we are staying there. I set early tee times for golf, I have a couple of drinks with the guys that I played with–even if its the first time I’ve ever met them. Or the wife and I are off to some tourist attraction or a beach all day.
And I know that is the same way I will be when I am the retired one. Three golf leagues, the traveling softball team, reffing high school sports, attending pro sporting events, serving on some kind of city council or county board, doing part time work in the clubhouse or on a local radio station, or getting up in the middle of the night to fire up the smoker for brisket or pork butt. It’s a good thing that almost everybody in those retirement communities have full-time landscaping contractors so I don’t have to make time for yard work.
So you won’t be hearing from me for the next 10 days. But don’t think that I’m just going to be laying around with fruity cocktails working on my future battle with skin cancer. I’ll still be doing something. It’s just the way I’m wired.
