What I miss about working...

 —and what I love about being retired.

Now that I have been retired for almost a year, ten months to be exact—I retired on 31st May 2021—I can see more clearly what I miss most about working.

Human interaction. But at a professional level. I am an introvert. I was painfully shy as a child and into my teens. I still do not enjoy large social gatherings, except with family. I hate small talk, talking for absolutely no reason. Since I retired, my husband and I will go for days without seeing other human beings. Fine with me, as I said, I don't enjoy idle conversation, particularly with strangers. But I find I miss the work related discussions where the team worked through challenging problems to come up with innovative solutions. 

Daily challenges. I loved my job and found the challenges stimulating and very satisfying, even when they were equally frustrating. I particularly loved coding. Coming up with automated ways to minimize manual intervention and then writing the code to implement these tools.

Management. Watching and guiding my team to grow their careers. That was probably the most difficult, and the most rewarding part of my job. Difficult because Amazon made it so. There was a very demanding set of requirements for anyone within Amazon to achieve promotion. And so rewarding managing to meet those requirements and see a talented engineer achieve their well deserved goal.

Independence. I am not sure if that word fully encompasses what I mean. I miss having places to go, such as the office or to conferences; things to do, deadlines to meet and meetings to attend. All of it seemed very mundane at the time—apart from the conferences which I loved—but now, looking back, it represented independence and a mission that I was on. Of course, my car was also a big part of my independence. (Mentioned here).

Of course I do also miss that regular paycheck.

What I love about being retired. I have blogged about this a few times as I became more familiar with the idea. As retirement was forced on me, it was difficult to adjust at first. But I think I am getting the hang of it. The best thing about being retired is time.

Time to spend on me. I never have to cut my workout short, if I get up a little later in the morning, I can still do a full hour on the treadmill, plus 30 minutes Yoga. I am probably a lot healthier now. When I was working, I often had to skip my workout or cut it short.

Time to write. I haven't done much blogging this month because I have been working on writing short stories, and on my book. I can, and sometimes do, write for hours each day.

Time to shop when the stores are quiet. I don't like shopping and when ever possible I do it online, but grocery shopping I prefer to do in person. The stores are almost empty mid week, during the morning. 

Time for my other hobbies, fishing, boating, embroidery and reading.

Of course I do love that I no longer have to tolerate being bullied by bad managers.