Originally Posted by auggie242
I've worked since I was 12.
My first job was mowing the lawns of empty houses for a real estate company (back when houses used to take months to sell, not hours or days). Great job. Then I added a paper route. Horrible job. It had many disadvantages including cold, snowy mornings and biting dogs, but far and away the worst was collecting for the paper. Door to door each month getting paid for the prior 30 days. They should have called that part of the job Introduction to Human Psychology 101. I discovered the world has people (unlike my parents) who are not honest. The world has people who are really creepy. The world has people who are really mean. The world has people who complain about everything. The world also has people who get their newspaper for free because they are some combination of the above.
I spent a summer picking rocks and bailing hay.
Do not ever agree to do these jobs.
Ever.
From ages 16 to 26 I worked in a factory, first scraping mold off of aged cheese before it was cut, sliced and packaged (not as gross as it sounds) and later in the shipping & receiving warehouse, loading and unloading trucks and box cars, cleaning toilets and floors, freezing in the basement cold storage area, sweating in the back of semis on the loading docks in the summer, freezing there in the winter, and infrequently living the life of luxury driving a forklift. I learned more from that job than I ever learned in 8 years of college. I learned you can be uneducated but wise. I learned you can be a bit "rough around the edges" and still be classier than I (or most doctors and CEOs that I know) could ever hope to be. I learned you can have a 3.5 GPA, set the curve in your college Analytical Chem class, and still be dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to fitting 61,000 pounds of cheese into a box car without it being damaged in transit. Mostly I learned what Jimmy Stewart's character says so well in It's A Wonderful Life. "Just remember, Mr. Potter, that this ''rabble'' you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying, and living and dying in this community." I would have gone through my life an educated but foolish twit, looking down my nose and thinking I was better than blue collar workers if not for those years. Some of those people embodied so much more of what I hold valuable in an individual than I ever will. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not a total romantic. There were, as well, some people there who were total idiots with the IQ of a field mouse, the morals of a second story man, the interpersonal skills of a hermit and possessed of no redeeming social value whatsoever. Still, it was quite a learning experience.
For the last 39 years I ran a solo dental practice in the same small semi-rural town of 7000 people that I graduated high school from. Almost no one moves away from here, so your successes, but also your failures are always on display right in front of you. I pretty much hated that job. OK, not even "pretty much". The upside is that financially, it's as lucrative as you choose to make it. The downside is you're on call 24/7/365 unless you're out of town. IMO, the whole system is wrong. I'm no socialist, but health care should not be a "for profit" proposition. That is just so wrong.
Retirement? How can you not like retirement? I've been retired now for 4 months. It's like summer vacation in grade school. Every day! My income has been halved, but if that's the price of freedom it is well worth it.
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