Licensed massage therapist / neuromuscular therapist

But I'm not allowed to say who signs my checks.

Last edited Mon Dec 23, 2013, 04:00 PM - Edit history (1)

I wanted to be a physicist or astronomer early on at university. I still keep up with developments in the field. I also envy engineers. Your job would have been a bream job for me. Hope you got much joy out of it.

I'm so jealous.

Account Manager for a food company.

grocery stores.

Major deli company..

but if it's Boar's Head I love you.

But i"m in PA and I think the computer is somewhere in Connecticut.
So no real intimate dealing with IBM, other than programming for their computers.
Retirement is a short 12 1/2 months away.

They've pretty much stopped going away. Still very useful for large scale processing. And more stable than the new stuff.

Basically one brute force application with a bazillion users.

I don't work on it so I'm not sure. Might be one of their Z series.

Fortran, Cobol?

writing software AND designing the machines.

Back when computers were as big as a football field (late 1960s), I remember him pointing to his wristwatch and saying that someday computers would be as small as this.

He's 80 now and his mancave has probably 10 computers of different makes and models - desktops and laptops and tablets. Loves his Ipod.

Currently doing network stuff in an environment with 30k ports, but also do pretty much everything else (20+ years) except I can't program my way out of a wet paper bag.

you'd fit right in

Now I'm the resident complainer.

eyes to how shitty things are.

and I no longer have the energy or stamina to pursue things the way I used to.
In three months, I'll be eligible for early Soc. Sec.

Did you know that you can go online and sign up about 90 days early? That helps to get the paperwork done before your birthday, so that you can receive your check the first day that you are eligible. In my case, about a week after I filled out that online application, I received a letter from my local SSA office. They required that I send in an official, notarized copy of my birth certificate, which I ordered from the State of Ohio some time ago. Cost was about $25 plus shipping. If you do not have a certified copy of your birth certificate, you might want to get it now.

After I sent in the bc, I received it back in the mail about a week later. Another couple of weeks go by and I receive conformation that my benefits start in January. My checks start then because my birthday is so late in the month, and because I made too much money this year to collect my benefits. They require that I inform them of my income from work, and if I make too much, I get no check. Right now, I'm still employed at my last job, making about $40,000 a year. So, as long as I have my job, I'm going to defer my benefits until I reach 66, my full retirement age. This is great, because each year I work and don't collect my check, I increase my monthly amount received. If I lose my job, I can work part time and collect up to my full early benefit of $1280 a month. So, I would encourage you to sign up right now. You can get everything done before your birthday arrives!


Edited because I cannot spellllll





http://www.socialsecurity.gov/pgm/retirement.htm

Thank you for sharing all this good information!

I'll get right on it.

play with cameras now and do some writing.

Environmental.

Office slave.

Now I do part time work filling in for the Tooth Fairy when she's on vacation.

....with no job title who works in the "job tracking" department of an HVAC distributor in Los Angeles.

I work with Department of Labor for training for unemployed people. I help people get their math and reading skills to a point where they qualify for job training through the Work Investment Act

In my mind I had convinced myself that you were a university professor. That's OK, I just found out the Scuba is a guy.

on the plus side, they are much harder to steal

I'm also a part time college student studying business and accounting, I have about a year and a half to go for my bachelor's degree.

Do you do it online since your on the road alot

But, yes, I still take most of my classes online. I've taken a few on campus that I thought I might need extra guidance on. I think I'll be able to take everything else online except for one class.

That's just a big 53' long box. Now days, I drive what is basically a dump truck- not quite the same, but it's similar.

Grocery store. I am the guy that meets those truckers who have posted above.

Reinventing yourself can be the way to go in this economy.

I'm a pretty good one, too, I think.

But that doesn't stop the howling hate-hyenas in GD for denouncing me for the hateful practice of stating that smoking is bad for you, and that inappropriate overprescribing of antibiotics contributes to microbial resistance.

Yeah, what do I know? I only have a license to practice clinical medicine, after all...

My blood pressure was through the roof I coughed constantly. But fast forward now to 5 years after quitting I feel great I will be honest it's hard to work in this industry and not smoke alot of chefs do but I don't miss it.

Literally...



Well done...

I got off work one day feeling terrible with the worst headache ever. My girlfriend insisted I go to the hospital cause it was bad my blood pressure was 195/140 my pulse was 123 and the doctor there told me it had to do with the amount I smoke. I got a long lecture from my girlfriend and primary care doctor and quit. I didn't miss paying the NYC prices for cigarettes either

I'm a smoker who needs to quit.

been high.

Although I avoid allopathic medicine whenever possible, having relied on nutrition and aureyvedic methods when possible. But hey, even heart surgeons like Oz and Weil support that. Having tended livestock so much, I'm a halfway decent bush doctor too, though I wouldn't try to practice on anyone else!

It always pleases me when researchers discover and publicize the facts on legitimate folk medicine as well. For instance, when they announced why the tree frog cure for wounds is effective. You know, where you bind a tree frog belly down over a wound and leave it there until it stops struggling and/or dies, then you go and find a fresh one. Poor little frog feels under attack and oozes a natural antibiotic from its belly. If I suffered a bad wound and couldn't find a tree frog, I'd look for spiderwebs. Etc. And yes, in a severe emergency I'd allow my dog to lick my wounds.

Until I made it to the hospital, that is! And I'm so with you on the overprescribing of antibiotics, both in amount and wrong applications. I happen to love pot but never would smoke it. Berkeley Brownies were my forte. Researchers have now learned that taking ibuprofen with weed negates the few drawbacks. But I can't even indulge in that no matter how lightly because where I live, the cops are as likely to be in the trade as anyone else. Not for one minute do I trust them not to wreak political revenge on me, so I simply abstain for now.

I rarely prescribe naturopathic treatment regimens beyond nutrition and exercise, because I'm not trained in it. But if a patient of mine prefers naturopathic treatment, I'm perfectly happy to refer out.

And I have no medical objection to marijuana, other than that one shouldn't smoke it. A cannabinoid derivative, dronabinol, helped my father overcome his persistent nausea secondary to chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer; and it helped stimulate his appetite enough to keep him going until his body just plain gave out.

I like your anecdote about the tree frogs. It reminds me of an "old wives' tale" that pre-dates modern allopathic medicine. It states that a poultice of moldy bread placed on an open wound can help prevent festering. This long pre-dates the discovery of penicillin.

wounds after an ambush; he rubbed dirt in them to stop the bleeding. That must've been awful, the whole experience - but he lived to tell about it at least. Those Army guys - well, I guess most in any branch of the service - know a fascinating amount of emergency self help techniques. A nurse I knew in Arizona started a side business as distributor for an ointment based on a lizard's ability to regenerate its tail. I got a tube and it worked better than anything I've ever seen. But we lost touch and now I don't know where to find her or another distributor. It was a little pricey but well worth it.

I get paid to check people's shorts...shocking isn't it?

On full disability.

point I don't see that as living off tax payers

First real job I ever got, and I'm still there 25 years on.

Stay in school, kids.

Unless you are talking to them, then they are ALWAYS right.

I try to figure out why weird things happen when people take drugs and medicine and then how to mitigate the bad ones.

Basic conclusion: People are just weird.

They go together pretty well. As my grandmother would say, "You just like to be all up in everybody's business." True dat!

Actually I'm a retired truck driver.

Was an instructor at an airline, before that was a self-employed lawyer. I still teach part-time at a local college and keep myself amused.

so I guess I'm a "good-two-shoes"!

For major airline. Union too....the horror!!!

Until United took them over than he took retirement.

Nothing wrong with it but it can be a tough occupation as one weathers the ups/downs, mergers/acquisitions of the industry.

Fugitive Task Force, 40+ years.
My team goes after the baddest of the bad and brings them to justice.

I worked in law enforcement for a decade, I didn't like it because over time I found myself making assumptions and stereotypes. Where I always assumed people would do their best, over time I assumed they were up to no good and lying. Call it burnout or being jaded. After a while the role did not suit me. For me it was limited opportunities that drove these choices.

Participating in the drug war made me sick.

You must be close or overdue for retirement. Be safe out there!

Retire next year in April, and thank you, I fully intend to be careful and enjoy my retirement.

Basically, I decided about a year ago after 2 years of un-and-under-employment following a brutal termination fight with my former employer (one of the largest banks in the US.) to chase a dream I'd had since I was in college (and initially put off until I had some experience¹, then put off for not the right time, then put off for lack of capital) to start a full-service boutique message-crafting firm specializing in the NPO sector.

We do PR, Development, Activism Messaging, Marketing, Capacity Building, Grantwriting, Social Media and the kitchen-sink. Basically, if you're an NPO and the task at hand has nothing to do with your core-mission or reason for existence, you can probably contract us to do it better...the economics of such a venture are good; we can afford better people (top PR staff-people, multi-million $ grant-writers, etc.) than most organizations can afford and better outcomes for less money. Most organizations would like all those people all the time, but can only afford maybe one of those people and really only need them briefly. This model allows us to "share" the need for a spread of such grantwriter/crisis-PR/SEO guru/etc. "just-in-time" across a dozen or more clients at about half the cost of a full-staff with a tidy profit margin. Ultimately, my goal is to allow one person with a personal cause to be able to set up an NPO out of the back bedroom that quickly rivals the large highly-recognizable NPOs in terms of capacity to achieve their mission and get their message out. We're not there yet...computers make it possible.

Because we lacked start-up capital and don't want to take outside financing, my partner and I decided to basically shoestring it into existence paying the bills of start-up out of pocket while working other jobs. So in addition to owning an ambitious business-experiment that hoovers my money (It's my proxy for the children I don't want) I work other jobs. (The best is "line-waiter" Get paid to wait in line by people who don't want to. If you're smart, you can get like $60/hour or more when the new iPhone comes out.) I cater and have a relationship with a number of local restaurants where I'll temp for a day if someone calls out or no-shows. I generally try to avoid restaurant work, I have Meniere's and I'm sure you can imagine why hard-of-hearing and balance-impaired makes working in a busy kitchen a dicey proposition. (I've totally turned into a knife before and have a stab scar for it.) I prefer catering anyways...the hardest thing in food for me isn't making anything...I hate cooking to order and worrying about ticket times, I'd much rather make large quantities of fancy food at a self-directed pace.

I grew up in the restaurant trade and much like Michael Corleone every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. In furtherance of that, when I was offered job-retraining to get out of the UI pool, I took it and ended up in exactly the minimal-standards intensive short-term (4.5 month) culinary program you'd expect. (The goal isn't to make you Thomas Keller, it's to qualify you to run a Starbucks or Applebee's. I already managed a 'bux so I got a free ServSafe course (Mine was out-of-state and expired) and some education and a lot of head-of-the-class moments for what I already knew. I supplemented the education with outside curricula. I'm not as good as someone with a 4-year degree nor is it a complete education but you can get one hell of a cheap culinary education between library resources, one-day classes and the content offered online by culinary schools...did you know there's an entire 50+ video promotional curricula from Le Cordon Bleu on YouTube? It's crazy, they teach the really-integral stuff (and a lot of less-important but neat stuff)...and it only has an average of like 9000 views on any of the videos.

1: which I now have, having served in every position professionally or as a volunteer, in the NPO sector from Administrative Asst. to Executive Director (mostly doing Outreach, PR and Development) and following a rigorous and substantial amount of certification and education. (I collect certifications like some people collect baseball cards.)

As the product of an excellent liberal arts education, both formal and self acquired, I know a lot more about how to live than how to make a living. Early on I acquired an aversion to employers because so many were abusive. At best the formal parameters were too constraining for me to be happy. What I enjoyed most was working (?) in the legit indie film business and raising Egyptian Arabian horses. Nothing matches that.

I've also written and painted a bit. Took out a nursing license as insurance against bad times. Always bought and sold my own real estate until I couldn't afford to rent (still can't). Worked in dot com, and the first big bust after that, I even drove a semi for the shortest length of time possible. Etc. It's really more a question of what have I not done. If not born a few decades too early, I would've tried to be a jockey because I'm crazy about horses and speed and don't really have good sense - all attributes in that field.

Oh, and for a long time in L.A. I filled in the empty spaces as a process server. Nobody ever suspected what I was up to because I'm a 5' tall female who presents soft. On the riskiest runs I sometimes had a friend waiting close by with the car motor running, because I have been chased out of buildings a few times. But that's the thing about short people: we don't usually want to fight, so we'd better be fast on our feet.

and trying to diversify for survival. Since I loved to devour financial magazines, sometimes I had early warning. And I've always been a maniacal saver, which turned in handy when circumstances forced me to retire almost four years before I could get social security. It was very hard, but at least I did land on a wing and a prayer. And pilots always say any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Sometimes I've had to limp or even crawl away on hands and knees, yet here I am still. As I've said probably too often, I never really had good sense.

Especially my last run at dot com when the 'boss' was a 20-yr-old kid whose father had financed the company in order to get her out of his real business; still a net savings for him. I don't think she was even half sane. For instance, on her 21st birthday she stood in the conference room literally stomping her feet and screaming, "I can't believe nobody got me a present!"

Well, duh... she was always screaming about something, and by that time the company was bleeding $ to the point everybody wondered who'd get the ax first. Finally when she got directly in my face, I purred, "Why, Kim, maybe nobody knew it was your birthday!" Poor kid never understood sarcasm. She screamed back, "Well, I put signs up all over the place! Can't you read?"

That girl was so stupid that when she was gone for a week on vacation (or rehab, maybe), I sold advertising space on the website to a major company; first day she was back, my contact called and got transferred to her office, SOP. In my office I could hear her screaming and caught the name of our expected new client, so I - well, I picked up to hear his end of it too. He kept telling that obviously out of control, wet behind the ears bozo that he wanted to talk to me. Which only made her angrier and louder. Pretty soon they hung up on each other and of course we never heard from him again.

Not long afterward she finished running 'her' company into the ground, and her behavior worsened. She managed to run off every employee except me. I only stayed to spite her and to protect the unemployment insurance coming. She fought me over that too, along with daddy warbucks, but it didn't do them any good. For one thing I offered the judge the phone # of our biggest potential ad client for reference just in case he needed to verify what I'd been saying.

So the dot com folded days later. I don't know what daddy did about his problem child after that. But that was the first time the worst threat of workplace violence came from one of my employers. Looking back on things almost a decade later, I realize I might've been smarter to quit like she made other people do. I'm just saying maybe I was stoopid myself to discount what she could've done. Her rages were astronomical.

for 13 years for hunting and fishing magazines across the U.S.

The pub's owned by an alum of the local university, and has been in biz for over 25 yrs.
I've run the back of the house for about 4...

I love this town, and it's my dearly-beloved's hometown.

Working in South Florida building Walmarts.

Went for library degree after kids were in school; I was looking for a quiet, orderly place.
Found out a lot goes on in public libraries - much more than checking out books.
I was lucky enough to be there when computer first came to be used, so I learned the basic skills as they were developing.

First job out of college was market research for P&G, traveling the USA - great fun for a young person - seeing the country on someone else's dime.

I was fortunate enough to live through the microcomputer revolution up close. Happy memories.

So much that I wrote my own Z80 & CP/M simulator Funnest project I've done in years.

All of CP/M, BIOS & BDOS fit into about 5 Kb of RAM, and you could understand every byte.

My first personal computer. From 1982, and it still works:

In the 80s. In HS I wrote a tic-tac-toe program in COBOL. it was a blast.

And I wrote a chess game, that was not very good, in dos basic. It could only beat my wife.

Your simulator sounds cool!

I have played with the raspberry pi. Sort of a old school deal.

Early in my career, I did bankruptcies, divorces and adoptions. The last 2/3 of my career, I specialized in corporate and business law.

I was a legal secretary/paralegal from 1975 to 2001 and then a self-employed legal transcriptionist for another eight years or so until I was old enough to get early Social Security. Now I'm a photographer who occasionally sells a picture. I'm certainly not depending on it for a "living," though.

Oh, I was also a correctional officer for a year back in the '80s. I had meningitis/encephalitis in 1980 and couldn't type for a while because of nerve damage in my arms.

I got a Master's in Liberal Studies at age 63. Took me 4 1/2 years but they were some of the best years of my life.

It was good that I retired during the really good times because I raised a ton of money when the stock market was going great guns. I left a couple of years before the crash in 08, altho the Major Gifts donors never really suffered at all.

Your professors loved you. We live for serious students and just about every older student I've had was a student who went back later in life.


Cher

p.s. in fact, if I could, I'd only teach older students. One thing I've learned is that youth is definitely wasted on the young.

Last edited Wed Dec 18, 2013, 09:24 AM - Edit history (1)

The courses we had were those that the professors mostly designed themselves and loved teaching, a relief from the standard courses required of undergraduates. This was true in almost every discipline, and the MALS program was all about that wide, overlapping course of study!

My village is not really big enough to support a full time idiot, so I work part time as the town drunk.

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Carry on!

CC

I thought you wuz an artiste now.

It's on the other side of the airport. W and I haven't been on speaking terms lately after I told him his uninspired paint-by-the-numbers artwork was making us village idiots look really dumb. Evidently he doesn't take constructive criticism well.

hehehe

I'll double it if it makes him stop.