Chapter 1: Shedding Some Detritus -or- What a Load of Schist!

“Thanks for calling the Marquis d’Sod, I’ll whip your lawn into shape!” I cheerfully announced, answering the telephone. Actually my name is really Mark, but frankly I like my new business name much better these days. I can’t remember the last time I’d wanted to cheerfully answer my phone, ‘Dr. Marcus Irving Snodgrass, Megalithic Oil Geophysics Department’. What a waste of thirty years, including most of college and graduate school! I should have never quit mowing lawns as a teenager!

There are several advantages to mowing lawns for a living. First, is that you will get a lot of fresh air, sunshine and exercise. I definitely needed that after over twenty years of riding a desk ... even driving a riding mower now at least gets me into the fresh air and the sunshine. Working on a lawn also gives you a lot of time to think. There is also something almost hypnotic about the rhythm of mowing back and forth, the drone of the cutting blades as they sweep across the lawn, exacting their precise harvest, while creating something uniform and even. Not a blade of grass out of place. It can be very zen-like, to become one with the lawn and the peaceful surroundings.

And the best part is that I’ll never have to put on a tie again for work!

On the not so good side is working outside in the hot South Texas summer sun, where it’s 99 degrees in the shade and something close to 120% humidity. But you do get used to it ... sort of, a bit.

I never realized how profoundly unhappy I was with my life and my work (mostly the same thing) until my wife died a few years ago from a sudden but severe illness. The large and well furnished house that we owned in a fashionable neighborhood of our metropolis seemed afterwards like an old derelict blimp hangar, a place for the storage of old useless things, mostly memories, with nothing needful or useful left over.

While my first youthful marriage had been a dreadful mistake for all of the parties involved, my beloved second wife Erin had been the complete and total love of my life. I had loved her deeply and now that I was alone, I had no thoughts whatsoever about how to fill the rather large empty place that she had held in my heart. For lack of anything else to do, I then buried myself as deeply as I could in my work. It succeeded for a while. We had no children, and while we hadn’t regretted it at the time, now there was nothing left of her left and this deeply and profoundly saddened me.

Any thoughts of reconciling with my first ex-wife were laughable. She had left me over twenty years ago after she had initiated an affair with the husband of her best friend while I was still a doctoral student back in Wisconsin. That mess caused two divorces and quite a few years of anger and semi-dysfunctional levels of bitterness for me. She had ‘upgraded’ two or three more times since and the last I’d heard she was reasonably happily married to the Chief of Surgery of a hospital in upstate New York. Now she had a big house outside of Buffalo right on the Erie Canal and living the life to which she had always wanted to become accustomed. More power to her. As for me, I learned long ago that money isn’t everything, and sometimes not even much of anything either.

I wasn’t exactly hurting myself. If nothing else, being a professional geophysicist for a major oil company can be an extremely lucrative position. On the other hand, it took five years for my BS (a double major of Geology and Physics), another two for my MS, and then the final slog to get my Doctorate. I was dangerous close to thirty years old before I was done with college! This did earn me a healthy six-figure starting salary, stock options, nice benefits, etc, but they also tried to work us nearly to death.

As the saying goes, ‘money can’t buy you happiness, but it will let you choose your own form of misery.’

My prescription for hiding my emptiness, a full eighty-hour work week, proved to be rather unfulfilling as I discovered the very first moment that I gave myself a few empty hours with nothing to do but think. I didn’t ever take my vacation time nor did I get to go on business trips often, so every single day of the week I put on my shirt and tie and went into my office. Why I didn’t keel over with a heart attack I don’t know!

Then ... one day I couldn’t just send a minion to visit a pipeline construction site near San Antonio, I had to go myself, in person, and that broke the glass bubble I’d been living in. For some reason I’ve never enjoyed flying, so when I elected to drive there, it gave me nearly four uninterrupted hours all by myself for the first time in years. I didn’t like what I heard myself saying, and the drive home was even worse, if at all remotely possible.

The job was going to kill me, I decided. No ifs, ands, or buts. It was just a matter of when I was going to utterly work myself to death ... and for what?

A few years ago my department had a work group team of about twelve people and now currently it was just myself and four others ... doing at least the same amount of departmental work. There had been layoffs (‘rightsizing’), transfers, a heart attack (not mine!), and a promotion to management to another department for our most incompetent and disliked team member, whose EEOC status as a minority made it legally impossible for anyone to fire her (even for gross incompetence and frequent blatant insubordination), so ... they promoted her. She got moved up to a supervisory position in the same pay grade as mine just so she couldn’t screw up the workflow anymore.

Sometimes shit like this made me wonder just how badly I’d have to fuck up in order to get promoted into senior management myself! That’s the trouble, I decided, with being ‘absolutely indispensable‘, in the words of both of my direct upper management bosses. Somebody actually had to get the real paying work done – and that was me and my team. Nope ... my ass was never going to get moved into that corner office where I could screw around all day and play a computer golf game like my boss did.

Now, when my pension very nearly fully vested, with almost a full twenty years at this company, I began to have a slight paranoid suspicion that maybe they were trying to work me to death or encourage me to quit before my pension became fully vested. Probably not in my case; They needed my group to get our work done on schedule as we generated a significant amount of corporate income, often handling 3-D seismic projects sub-contracted from other oil and gas companies. My department was a profit center, so really I was actually probably safe from most HR machinations. Still, you could count on one hand the number of twenty-year plus veterans still working in the other departments at this division of the company. Endless rounds of ‘right-sizing’ had long ago trimmed off any fat and the latest series of staff cuts had carved right to bone.

I put these unwholesome thoughts back into their locked cupboard in my head for a few more months and kept my nose down and the eighty-hour work weeks rolling in. Nose still to the grindstone, but my thoughts increasingly full of sedition. I just ignored how increasingly tight my chest was starting to feel for those last nine months of my continued death march, until that wondrous and glorious day when I officially received my official notice of being completely 100% vested in the retirement program.

Reading the paperwork frontwards, backwards and even sideways a time or two, I decided to make my escape plans immediately, before I had my first extremely overdue heart attack. I ran the numbers over and over until my keyboard keys began to squeak. If I quit immediately and took early retirement now, I’d still be entitled to about half of my current monthly salary (still a six figure income, but barely). I could even keep my medical benefits and continue on with the company health plan for a moderate monthly cost. There was also an option to transfer and cash in the prorated salary value of all of my remaining unused vacation and sick days directly into my 401k plan. I gave that a good look-over too. It was just one mouse-click away from being transferred over to an independent brokerage firm the minute I retired to then be diversified enough so that even if my old company pulled an Enron, all of my retirement account would not just be in company stocks and bonds (as it currently was).

Suddenly I felt happier about myself than I had felt in years!

The next Monday morning bright and early I planted myself in my boss’s office (a semi-useless git of a kid that I had personally trained over ten years ago who did sloppy seismic work but could push papers and pass the buck with the best of them) and politely, but very firmly gave him a few ultimatums.

Immediate promotion of at least one pay grade and with a better job title, like Senior Manager Immediate reduction of my work hours back down to the theoretical normal forty-hour week. I made it clear I going to start keeping 8-5 hours, regardless of how backed up our work log was Immediate hiring of at least two additional junior geotechs for my department (with another two to be added for the next fiscal year budget). Or alternatively, if none of the above was possible - a company transfer to another division with a promotion jump of at least two grades (to VP level), with a guaranteed staff and full departmental control. Hah! They’d never agree to that.

Naturally, I received sympathy ... but nothing else. None of my demands were at all ‘feasible’ at this time, but he would take up my requests to higher management in the future. About what I expected from the lame git. He was just a MBA and not a scientist. I don’t think the kid ever really understood exactly what we did for a living anyway ... even while he was there working among us for six months supposedly learning the ropes.

I was not at all discouraged, and I visited his boss, and then his boss’s boss later on the same week, preaching pretty much the same story ... and receiving the exact same blow off. No surprise whatsoever – that was exactly what I expected right from the start, but I had to go through the motions. Now, my conscience was clear!

It was a good finish to the work week to walk into our HR Department at 4 p.m. on Friday to turn in my already filled out my Retirement paperwork. I even gave them a month’s notice of the effective date. Since I was currently carrying three extra weeks of vacation that they wouldn’t pay me for (I had seven and they’d only pay out for a maximum of four) I’d already made arrangements to be ‘on vacation’ for the final three weeks of my employment. All very official, by which I mean I made a near-perfect forgery of my boss’s signature on the vacation form and left it in his administrative assistant’s in-box. I carefully didn’t mention that I would also probably take ‘sick time’ for most of this upcoming week too.

My one week long ‘last month’ came as a bit of a revelation and major ‘Come to Jesus’ moment for everyone. I gave my team a heads up to warn them that they would be even more shorthanded soon, especially since I did more than my share of the menial grunt work. Not surprisingly, several of my team admitted to me that they were entertaining job offers elsewhere and now they would definitely be jumping ship also, ASAP. Everyone was tired of being over-worked with no hope for promotion into even the lower rungs of corporate management, even for average standard industry pay. My very best young geotech just went ‘fuck it’ and quit on that same Friday too, without even bothering to give notice. The kid had been getting calls from headhunters for months and I heard he started a new (better hopefully) job a week later.

Oh, there was howling once the news of our insurrection hit the executive floor a few of the smarter VP’s upstairs did try belatedly patch things up before our entire group became scattered to the four winds, but there was too much resistance to give in to our ‘extortion’ and in the end their appeasement efforts came to nothing. This didn’t hurt my feelings one little bit – now I was certain that I had made exactly the right decision.

My boss would have to start working for a living now apparently, and it didn’t agree with him. As the saying goes, ‘The floggings will continue until morale improves’.

Within six months the last member of my old work team had left and their replacements weren’t nearly knowledgeable enough to even handle the easiest sort of our routine work, let alone getting it done under impossible time deadlines. This formerly very profitable department of the company was now losing money (and clients) and my former boss was suddenly no longer on the corporate fast-track to a nice upstairs corner office. He tried the whip approach with the new team and the good skilled young scientists all quit, so he cleaned house and fired everyone ... then brought in a new batch of new hires. The floggings continued, morale sunk to bedrock, the quality newbies quit, the company lost more contracts for seismic processing, and upper management became very, very annoyed. My old boss was fired and they brought in a new MBA who had even less of a geo-science background than his predecessor and the same cycle continued endlessly thereafter, from what I heard.

None of this was any longer my problem.

Finding something to do with my retirement was much harder. I’d sold off the big house that my late wife and I had shared, and I then moved into a much smaller furnished condo. Even most of the old furnishings from the house were giving me sad memories so they went to Goodwill. While packing and moving, I discovered that there was actually very little of my old stuff that I really wanted or needed to keep. Even my collection of several decades’ worth of scientific journals went as a donation to my local library, mostly still unread. I bet they just tossed them into a paper recycling bin, entirely still unread.

Most guys dream about being able to retire financially secure at the age of fifty. They could then play golf and chase golf balls all day or chase women, or travel or do something ... but within a week of being home and doing nothing I was already bored silly.

If working was just dying slowly, then sitting around the condo all day watching TV and brooding was even worse. I had absolutely no reason to even get out of bed in the morning, and some days I just didn’t. I needed to find something to do with my life now!

I gradually entertained the idea of going to work again in my field for a competitor and made a few casual phone calls and even put on the suit once again to do a few interviews but they didn’t amount to much of anything. I did get a few job offers to do essentially what I had been already doing for the last twenty years, but the thought of getting back into that grind all over again had no appeal to me. I declined, and spent the next few months having a passionate affair with the Turner Classic Movies channel and old single-malt scotch.

I tried chasing little white golf balls and then tennis balls for a while, but I just didn’t find either sport that interesting. Even the idea of chasing women again just didn’t have the appeal that it used to. I signed up for a dating service and discovered very quickly that most women about my age wanted the ‘big house in the suburbs’ routine that I had just quit and furthermore, they didn’t want a ‘early-retired’ husband kicking around the house all day either. All too many of them were looking for the big ‘upgrade’ to their lifestyle, and I just wanted my life to get simpler. In fact, the majority of my lady dates reminded me entirely too much of my first ex-wife.

Nope ... not happening.