Shower maundering

I get some of my best ideas while taking showers. My only problem is I forget them while drying off. This happened today, for example. I had a brilliant idea for a post but got mentally sidetracked while toweling off and it's gone forever. It might come back as I engage in some random thoughts...

My vacation trip is about half over. Are they really vacations if you are retired? Vacations from what? It's not like I have to be anywhere.

I figured out I am living on government subsidy and corporate welfare. I get SS checks (actually, deposits) each month as well as a pension from the huge, bumbling, telecom corporation I used to "work" for. There should be a different term for what I did. You see, I enjoyed my job and found it to be the least demanding employment I ever had. I worked much harder as a busboy when I was 19. The Navy came close because I rarely had much physical labor to perform... I was  SONAR technician... but I can't count that because the pay was very poor. I figure I was paid according to the labor I expended.

At AT&T (and Southern Bell and Pacific Telephone), I was greatly overpaid. If you look at the actual physical labor involved. Fellow employees would say we were paid for what we knew; for our knowledge, not for our actual labor. Most of them were grossly overpaid in that case. But I did like what I did. Next to retirement, I enjoyed my years as a troubleshooter/technician the most. But I was born to be retired.

I would never have survived if I worked in construction or other labor intensive job. Maybe I could have been a government employee...

There are times when I wonder if I could have made a career of the Navy. I enjoyed being at sea for long periods much more than being in port for weeks and months. In that I was unlike most of my shipmates. They felt trapped, confined, while at sea. Limited to just the ship (and my ship was not very big... being a destroyer) was like living on a small island with no way off. I felt that more while in port. You knew there was something out there to go to... places, people, activities... but you couldn't leave until liberty hour (and not even then if you had "duty"). But I never felt that pressure at sea. There was no place to go.

When you were only in port for a few days, it wasn't as much of a problem. You could go on liberty drink and spend and have a good time without much care about consequences or running out of money. After all, in a few days you'd be out at sea again with nothing to spend it on anyway.

I would have wanted to spend most of my career at sea. And that usually doesn't happen. And I wouldn't have much control over where I would be working and living. Or for whom. You can't just quit and walk away easily in the military.