retirement’s hidden perk
Before 11 o’clock the other morning, we
Did a careful, slow walk around the outside of our house, taking notes about where rotted siding had to be replaced so we could email the contractor to ask if and when he could start work.
After two in-person visits, made three phone calls and was on hold for a total of 40 excruciating minutes while trying to contact the computer repair shop working on installing a new battery in the laptop.
Drove over to the credit union that has our mortgage and asked them to explain the incomprehensible letter we got saying our house did not have hazard insurance although our house does have hazard insurance.
Checked back again with Google flights to see if it’s easier to fly to Cincinnati in October or should we go to Columbus — but would it be cheaper if we flew on Tuesday and then returned on Friday rather than leaving on Thursday and coming back on Monday?
Oh, and we also had time to wonder: how do people who are not retired do all this?
How do people who have full-time jobs find the minutes and hours to do all the trivial, tedious, inconsequential but extremely time-consuming stuff that can only be done during the workday?
How do people who have full-time jobs and maybe young children find the time to be on hold, listening to the same insipid music and being told again and again how important our call is to them?
How do those who are not retired have time to check the minutiae of medical bills, line by line, making sure they weren’t charged for an X-ray when they haven’t had an X-ray this year. Or have the time to examine the credit card accounts to make sure there have been no fraudulent charges.
Where do they find the time to delete the hundreds, maybe thousands, of unnecessary emails that flood the inbox every day, and when do those who are not retired do everything else that takes so much time?
Sure, getting older might mean we can no longer run marathons and we have to take too many pills and occasionally we forget a word here and there and sometimes we walk into the living room and have no idea why we have walked into the living room.
But if we are retired, we have time to waste!
We have time to made doctor’s appointments for the middle of the day and then wait in the waiting room for 45 minutes, because “the doctor is running a little late today.”
We have time to keep saying, “I want to talk to a representative,” when we are trying to look up an account and going through the interminable new phone menu options of some mega-corporation.
We have time to be disconnected after going through all the menu options and then nevertheless to try again, from the beginning, to press first 3 and then 6 and try to finally talk to a real representative, an actual human being.
We have time to study the benefits summary from our health insurer and try to figure out why the health insurer refused to cover two of our pill refills.
We have time to complain to the department store that the top we ordered was supposed to be a small, not an extra-large, after we have spent time searching for the phone number for the local store and not the corporation headquarters.
We have time to go to the UPS store and get a box to return the top that was extra-large.
We have time to figure out how to unsubscribe to one of those streaming channels we subscribed to with a free trial and don’t want to continue at the end of the free trial because it will cost $49 a month forever. We have time to search for that small unsubscribe box on the homepage and to tell it yes, yes and yes again, we definitely want to unsubscribe. No, we don’t want to give you one more chance.
We have time to get a second opinion, and a third.
How do you find the time for all that if you’re not retired? The answer, of course, is you don’t.
So, X-rays that were never actually done probably remain part of the medical bill charges and making that appointment with the dermatologist will have to wait until vacation time and calling someone about the appliance repair will be done on the weekend, but only if the appliance repair shop is open on the weekend. You go with that first opinion.
But when you’re older and retired, you have time — time, most of all, to do nothing. But of course, we don’t do nothing because there’s so damn much to do.