You Can Leave Your Hat On

I retired about eighteen months before COVID-19 changed life as we know it. 

My lovely and loving wife went from having my smiling face across from hers at the kitchen table one meal a day, at dinner, to all the meals, all the time. I have little doubt that she does cart-wheels on those days I share with her at mid-morning that I'm going for a walk. (I have noticed marks on the living room rugs where, maybe, she has pulled the couches farther apart and wider so she can stick the landing on the dismount). 

I worked from home, rather than take sick leave when I had various surgeries to replace my knees, and later for the stents placed in my heart (to no avail; unlike the Grinch's, mine did not grow at all much less two sizes bigger). My full-time job was not especially physically demanding (or ethically challenging as one former colleague put it), so working from home suited me fine. 

Additionally, for a period of a little more than two and a half years, my organization was too stupid to understand how to purchase the software to maintain the various presences that I had originally created on a variety of internet platforms so I bought it and installed it on my home computer since I couldn't put 'private' software on their machine. 

As you may have just realized, I wasn't the Employee of the Month, ever, and have never bothered to look back at the twenty-six and a half years I worked for them with anything other than anger, regret, and relief to have escaped. I can count on one hand the number of times I've encountered former co-workers since leaving the organization and I know you don't need me to tell you which finger on the hand I use for the counting. 

Bygones. 

I was never confronted with the challenges of only working from home, or developing the coping strategies outlined in this article that centers around working in the buff, as opposed to the suburbs of Buffalo, which to my knowledge is NOT a euphemism for something hinky or kinky. I think my favorite part of the entire piece, and the one that caught my eye in all candor, was the use of "inevitable," in the title. 

And I can't help but smile, as the article used pseudonyms throughout (not really clear as to why, but is not to reason why or not) that quotes one Sherman Williams' explanation on the clothing-optional work-from-home lifestyle that has, at least for me, permanently dissuaded me from ever exploring the used-computer keyboard market. Yeah, sticky keys are just not worth explaining, ever.
-bill kenny