Last updated on 2/14/2023
The retirement phase creeps up and blindsides you when you’re looking the other way. There’s no farewell party or gold watch these days, it’s more like a quiet exit stage right. First a few of your co-workers give up and vanish, then clients start fading away one by one, either your people vamoose or they file for chapter 11. Finally your company itself packs up the old kit bag and walks away. You’re the last one left in the spotlight, then CLICK [darkness], that’s it for this career thing. It’s been a creative blast for 30+ years, but… time for whatever’s coming next in life.
As usual, the older-sibling boomer cohort has been down this path before you and left some sourdough crumbs for you to follow. This bunch seems to be spelling out a message – Encore Career, it says. A third act in life, a chance for you to pursue some interest or option you left behind. Maybe you developed some interest in mid-career that you weren’t able to dive into then. Now’s your chance! Before your bad knees or some medical event sideline you for good, go for it! What will it be for you?
Surprise, your new career is here!
Well, in this checkered career, chapter 3 turns out to be… plumbing! Bet you didn’t see that coming. An old friend who’s made his living in the trade needs some “short-term” help. You’re feeling a little adrift that day, so you make the mistake of saying yes, and a new plumber is born. Short-term somehow turns into every week and here you are five years later. Turns out you have a talent for lugging cruelly heavy toolboxes up and down basement stairs. Also turns out to be more interesting and amusing than you thought possible at first.
The first thing you learn is how much of your time is spent not twisting wrenches, but riding around in a rattle-bang truck between jobs. An organized person like yourself would plan out the days so you zipped from one job to the next without wasting precious billable time, but no. Your first job is at one rural end of the county, the next at the polar opposite urban corner. Need some part not on the magical rolling inventory-mobile? Back in the truck and off to the nearest supply house you go. Get comfortable with riding around the county where you grew up, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it again.
Living in a truck isn’t so bad most of the time, but this friendship is one of the shall we say prickly kinds where you disagree on a lot of things, especially politics in these powder-keg times. Throw in a few other hot-button topics – statehouse shenanigans, work ethics (kids these days!), culture wars – and you end up having to roll down windows to clear the smoke. Fortunately these days are few and you can find some things you actually agree on, so all is not sturm und drang. But some days it is a relief to get out of there and start doing something physical.
On-the-job Perks
Which mainly turns out to be getting your full quota of stair-work in every day. Most of your time you spend in the basement, only occasionally venturing as far as the kitchen or second floor bath. So that’s where the tools need to be, every wrench, welding tank, hammer drill and arm-stretching tool kit. And when you’re done, every grimy piece of it has to come right back up. This is a far cry from your air-conditioned days sitting in front of a computer screen. On special festive occasions, there is a hugely awkward sewer-cleaning machine or a hundred-gallon water heater (big houses need big appliances) that requires a crew of three to wrestle into place. These are the days when you realize there might need to be another encore after this one, because your body is voting NO.
And all those houses! This is the single part of this deal you enjoy the most, having entry into every kind of house ever built, houses you would never have seen in your other life. In the same day: mansion with sculpture in the foyer and a mountainside view (OK, Lake County mountains, but still), then later a worn-down inner-city American Gothic. Houses where you never saw the dozen cats rumored to live there, but you still knew for sure they were there. Clean houses, dirty houses, hoarder houses, TV-rehab-show houses, well-preserved 1950s-moderns, a few historical 1890s museums. Your favorites are the lake houses. Right on the edge of Lake Erie, they have stunning sunset views and you can watch the storms roll in from Canada. You have to stop gawking and get back to work every time you’re in one of these.
Ups and Downs
Some days go better than others. Nice when you get to work outside in the summer, when the homeowner has a sense of humor, better yet to get a $50 tip for coming out on a holiday. If the new furnace goes in with no cross-town part runs or scraped knuckles, that’s a win. Getting home uninjured before dark is a plus.
Other days, well… Sloshing through foul black-water drain overflow or getting woozy from the PVC cement in an unventilated closet were not in that career brochure. Sliding a half-ton boiler down a rickety set of stairs, waiting for a tow when that old truck dies at a red-light, moving a dozen water heaters on scrap day? Also right down at the bottom of your list. Worst of all, taking a header downstairs (those damn stairs!) and ending up in a heap with the toolboxes on top of you. That’s a day you won’t forget, when your memory finally does come back.
And in a service business, you’re meeting people everyday. You come face-to-face with the human condition whether you’re ready for it or not. The elderly man living alone in the family home unchanged for 60 years. Hoarders and packrats: they’re out there and they’re just like us except for one little thing. The young dad with 30 rifles stored in the basement – be very polite in that house. The kids who follow you around with a hundred questions, the cat-lady with a shaky grip on the present, and one sobering day, the stage-4 cancer patient who has to self-inject morphine while you’re there. Your own troubles tend to vanish on days like these.
And… Exit
“Maybe I should have gone this way to start with,” you think some days. The stress is mostly physical instead of the deadline-induced anxiety you’re used to. You could have acquired a a set of useful hard skills by now. People are mostly happy to see you arrive – that’s a nice feeling. Also feels like you’re solving real-world problems for people who seem grateful, at least until they see the bill. Probably would have been better off when you got to this point, maybe even owned the business. What if?
Of course, you could also have had knee surgery and 3 hernias by now. You would have been a lot less present for your family – this is one of those always-on-call careers. There’s also a lot less emphasis on blue-sky creativity and more on doing things literally by the book. You certainly would have chafed at that.
So it seems like things went the way they were supposed to go for you. So many people can’t say that – no matter what their plan might have been, life went some other crazy way. A career crash, a move, accident, injury, divorce – all these bombs that could have been thrown your way but weren’t. On the days when your eyes are wide open, you can see that life has been more than fair to you. Even this unexpected encore thing has turned out to be something you could use for growth. It pays to keep those eyes open. What will be next?
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