Wednesday, 22 January 2025
As the golden release slips away
As the official retirement age slips further and further away from young people today, we may imagine a scenario where curmudgeonly oldies still have to work, even if they only sit in an office glaring at whatever a computer screen has evolved into.
Firing off a couple of sarcastic emails, our office curmudgeon takes a note of the little clock he or she has placed in the corner of the screen showing how many dull days must pass before the golden release of official retirement.
But too soon the next scheduled meeting has to be endured. This time the meeting is about [1] followed by some work on the main project until it is time to cram into a Council Tram for the official homeward commute to a thermally efficient box known as home.
The point here is that having an older and older workforce is likely to mean more and more disgruntled workers who see no future in what they do and no compelling reason for doing it other than financial. For current oldies - maybe ours was the Golden Age.
[1] At this point, both readers will have to fill in their own plausible details of a routine meeting. I have been retired for long enough to forget what meetings were about. It has all blended into a grey morass of coffee, biscuits, lunches, forgotten hotels and endless, endless chatter about things which didn’t really matter.
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7 comments:
Meeting: business process whereby the maximum number of people spend the maximum amount of time achieving bugger all.
Jannie - and everyone could have been doing something more useful such as picking up litter in the local area.
You are describing the lucky ones. Most will be given a "living wage", paid enough to remain in thermal efficiency and enjoy sport, porn, and the occasional trip to the gym for exercise and the hospital for worship.
My dispiriting realisation before I took early retirement was that all the bright young things were pushing their 'new ideas' while I knew they had been tried before and achieved nothing.
My own organisation, in one of its fits of cost cutting, banned tea and biscuits for meetings and so removed the one thing that made meetings bearable.
The only way we got through several 'forward policy strategies' was by quietly playing Bullshit Bingo, an open secret among the workers.I
Penseivat
I know they aren’t a popular sector of the population at the moment but spare a thought for old and curmudgeonly teachers who don’t have the option of sitting at a desk (it’s not a sedentary profession - not if you do it properly, at least) and are faced in their late sixties with increasingly vile pupils and younger colleagues and the ever-present fear of public denunciation for wrongthink or worse.
I’m out now, but back in my chalkface days, I made a point of equipping all of my pupils with a ‘thinking toolkit’ which, along with Occam’s razor,
Utilitarianism, the tragedy of the commons etc., included Xeno’s paradox (Achilles and the tortoise). I wonder whether they remember it fifty years hence when, if things keep going in this vein, they are likely to see their retirement age slipping ever further into the future.
Sam - I think a future version of that lifestyle is probably being discussed now, one reason why the political contempt for ordinary people keeps leaking out.
DJ - bright young things must be the curse of many organisations. We see it now where government officials and politicians still think they can spot winners.
Penseivat - I bet lots of civil servants play Bullshit Bingo when they have meetings with Ministers.
Macheath - "increasingly vile pupils and younger colleagues and the ever-present fear of public denunciation for wrongthink or worse."
When thinking about teachers and teaching I'm always reminded that I wouldn't do it. Even from outside the profession it is obvious from what our grandkids tell us that the problems you describe are real and our government has no answers. We have teachers in the family and vile parent seem to be a problem too.
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