Retired... Part 2

Today was my last day at work. While it was a fairly monumentous day for Tim last week, being his career for nearly 40 years, it's merely a blip in the radar for me. I've never really had that "one thing" I wanted to do in the way he wanted to be a pilot all his life. I've had 6 jobs over my life time, most of them in aviation parts but not all, and the only constant through all of them was the fact that I worked really really hard at whatever the job was. Harder than anyone else I knew, and hard enough to draw pretty frequent comments from my spouse as well as a slew of others about the fact that I was crazy for doing so since most employers don't give a rat's ass about their employees, a fact borne out by the average lifespan of a job today - 5 years. I was thinking about this a lot as I finished my last day, and I thought I'd share a tidbit of advice that my dad once gave to me, something that was pretty instrumental in making me who I am today.

He once told me to always do the best job I could at whatever I was working on, whether I liked the boss or not, whether I liked my coworkers or not, whether I liked the environment or not, whether I even liked the work itself or not. He told me to always do the best I could because it was the right thing to do for me. The boss and the coworkers would indirectly benefit, but the primary reason was because it was the right thing for me. I've always lived by this advice, so it really doesn't matter to me whether I'm working on a parts sales team, or mixing aviation paint, or cleaning apartments, or now cleaning and maintaining a boat, work is work, and it's all good.

Tomorrow, however, I'm not setting an alarm.