Older Workers Like Work-One Person's Odyssey
For some, the day job is the only place where you can find meaning and purpose. But for many, it's also a painful reminder of how age can affect health, income, and social stability. For those of us over 50 who've been lucky enough to land part-time work in recent years as they age out of traditional retirement positions, the journey has been fraught with challenges.
In this blog post you'll read about an older woman's odyssey through work in a new way that goes beyond what her employer promised her: life fulfillment and the joys of expression and creativity on demand. You'll also hear that, while she's happy in her job, this is not the end of her retirement plans. With the help of a professional organizer, she's finding great satisfaction with downsizing and simplifying. This experience is both inspiring and instructive.
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I'm an older (almost 60) woman who used to be a corporate executive in Silicon Valley. After a stressful couple years in the work-a-day world after my husband retired, I decided that I was ready to retire and move on with my second act. But how do you leave money behind to enjoy your later years? Enter my job search.
Just prior to leaving, my employer had me do a new job function that they said would be a stepping stone to something else. (It turned out to be, "Everything we hire is an older person.") I wondered if I would have ever asked for my retirement, had I known this was my position within the company.
Prior to this, they told me that I was the oldest person working in the company and one of their most enthusiastic promoters of their products who was very supportive of their young recruits. They also boasted about our high employee engagement and how much we worked at improving things for our customers. They were proud that we were all "agile" and constantly learning through our work with customers and each other. They said that I related well to the younger employees and was always a good employee.
But then came my first full-time job after my company transferred me from the Bay Area to their headquarters in Salem, Oregon. I was given a new set of objectives: I had to be available around the clock and could not get at all involved in any customer interactions. In fact, they warned me that if I went into any meeting with a customer and tried to give them advice, they would tell me not to do that. They told me that I was one of their best promoters who should not change because it would reflect badly on them as people.
All this happened just as my second child started college at Oregon State University...and just before my youngest child went off to college. I was so upset with the changes that I became teary-eyed at the thought of leaving my job. I asked myself, "How can you say all those nice things about me and then turn around and take away all my power?"
I knew that I had to come up with something new, and one day while in a store shopping for shoes, I saw a gadget that runs from your mobile phone. Sure enough, it looks like a mobile phone but actually records your conversations on an SD card. You can then give the recording to whoever you want, play it back for yourself or others to listen to at their leisure or download it onto your computer.
I bought one right away, and later I decided to go back and listen to some of my calls. My heart sank when I heard my own voice on the recording telling the customer, "Well, if you have any questions that we haven't addressed through this phone call or email, please email me and I will get the answers for you."
Oops. The employee engagement crowd would not like my trying to give advice to customers. The idea of registering these things just before I left began to bug me because it seemed sneaky.
And then there was my husband's situation, who was in lousy health at the time we moved from California to Oregon. He never really recovered. I knew that I needed to work at something that would make me happy, but I did not expect to find it on LinkedIn.
But when you are unemployed, you have time on your hands. So one day I decided to join Linked In and found a part-time job. I answered a couple of questions and one guy called me back directly and offered me a job doing "Feedback for an IT company." Whatever that was all about, it had nothing to do with speaking with customers! (I later found out that this was a front end for customer support.) My first day of work was the next Monday morning at 8:00 AM. I was so excited to be working with people.
The company had three younger employees who were new hires and three older ones like me in the office at all times. The younger ones seemed more interested in social media and memes, whereas we older ones were always asking a lot of questions about why certain things needed to be done a certain way and all the other inside stuff that we were constantly learning about. That was a fun job for me because I had much more knowledge than the other two part-timers combined. My boss told me, "They're smarter than you." But I did not care, because that's how I started my own business years ago and it made me happy then, too.
My boss then asked me if I would like to do customer service for the five months I had left before retirement. (I was hoping to stay longer.) One day the phone rang and it was a young customer asking me how they could improve their websites.
"Do you want to talk online with her?" my boss asked. "We'll never get any work done unless I'm there with you." To which my boss added, "She'll probably be able to help you out with some of your technical problems, since she's worked as an engineer." So I said, "Sure. Why not?"
It turns out they are in the telecom industry, and they had been trying to upgrade their website, but it was always taking so long and had a lot of errors. I told them that their website was not made for smartphones, much less iPhones and Android hand-helds. I explained how to make the site more user-friendly for the devices. They asked me if I could fix a problem on their website that was causing them to lose three minutes of their daily sales. So my boss put me on the project, and we spent a couple of days fixing it online. Another day my boss said she needed a report about how many customers we were getting from various marketing outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn and so forth. She wanted a presentation for their annual meeting next month. So at the end of a long workday, I sat down and put together all the information that she needed.
I was so happy that I had found my second job. And then another week passed and we were out of work again, but this time it was because they were axing us, saying that they needed to eliminate some jobs in order to save money. They were moving the office to Asia in two weeks and they laid off 90 people.
Conclusion
The company did offer me a severance package (severance package?) which would pay me if they stayed in business. The only problem was that they were not in business, and they were not going to be in business unless they could find some way to fix their website, so I decided to resign from that job as well.
So now I am going from a part-time job to zero: no income for the next three months. Then after that I have to figure out what do I want to do next?
I always wanted my own company, and maybe it's time for that dream to come true.