Clocking Out

I retired the last day of 2025 after 32.5 years working to support people with developmental disabilities to get jobs and try to have the lives they want to have. I was lucky enough in my career to be able to pursue all I wanted to do in multiple positions – from a case manager to a vocational coordinator to a project manager. It really was a great way to get to know what the world is about, and to use whatever skills I had to help people often left out of the equation.

It dawned on me though that I'm also retiring from close to 47 years of just plain paid work. Almost half a century. I got my first paying job when I was 13. I'm sure most retirees do this: survey their whole work-lives, not just the career part, and try to find the meaning in all that activity, all that dedication to persevering and finding a way to stay sane through it all. 

Getting a job, for me, was really when I first understood that I could escape my circumstances. I could become a part of something that supplied a logic outside of what my life was giving me. Clocking in and doing what I was supposed to do ironically freed me up. I was a weird kid. My first instinct was always to figure out escape routes. Through drawing, writing, watching TV, reading, going to the movies by myself…

So having a place where you go to do what you are supposed to do and then you get paid? That was logical, that was a way to move my life forward and away from what it might turn out to be if I didn’t try to change things.

Work became the ultimate escape for me, but also the ultimate recognition of who I was, what I was capable of. 

When I was 13, I got that first job at a greasy spoon in Pendleton, Indiana called the Irish Point, ran by an older couple who lived upstairs above the restaurant. I was a car-hop, dish-washer, grill-cook, waiter. All of it. And from the get-go I understood that if I did what I needed to do, I was no longer connected to other parts of my life I didn’t want to be a part of. When I worked there, I was a worker. Tautological for sure, but also kind of revelatory.

At the Irish Point, the people I worked with had a shared purpose outside of ourselves: making crappy food, serving it to people, cleaning up after them, etc. And while we often did not do that great of a job, it was something to make us feel like we were autonomous adults. And there was comradery based on that singular purpose. Plus we got paid. Not that much, but still…

That kind of holds true for all the jobs I’ve had. Whether I loved, liked and/or despised all the people I worked with, at least we had a way to understand each other. A lovely utilitarian trust built on “Hey can you give me a hand with this?”    

Case in point: closing time at the Irish Point. People come in a minute before we get to lock the doors. If you are a closer ready to shut down the grill and sweep and mop the dining room and run the last dishes through and people come in at that last minute, there’s a shared look among all of the employees. A shared acknowledgment of circumstance. You are exhausted and pissed off and you want to scream at those late, last-minute ass-holes, but here they are, ordering, waiting on it, acting like late-night kings and queens.

And you all have to do what you have to do. That exhausted, slightly hateful look among closers is a lifeforce. A way to get through, the secret sarcastic river you skate away on as needed.

It’s something that has stuck with me. The weird comradery formed by hating what you have to do and doing it anyway. And it really did guide what I wound up doing career-wise: working is central to adulthood and survival and friendships and just kind of understanding who you are in a world that's a lot of times confusing and apathetic. I used that sense of who I was as a worker to fuel my ambition to help people with disabilities get real jobs.      

Retirement now for me is kind of like when I first started working: I’m finding yet another escape route. I’m also focusing for the first time in a long time on writing stories and sending them out to be judged by strangers. I used to do that on the regular, but these past few years I shifted more toward regular old work. I continued to write, but I stopped sending any of it out. Now I have the time and the will to give it a try again. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

Just for the hell of it, here are all the jobs I’ve ever had:

1. Irish Point (1978 – 1981)
2. Kentucky Fried Chicken (1981 – 1983)
3. Rax Roast Beef (1983 – 1984)
4. Bonanza Steakhouse (1984 – 1985)
5. Ponderosa Steakhouse (1985 – 1989)
6. TGIFridays (1989)
7.  Indiana Bell Janitor (1989)
8.  Librarian Assistant (1989)
9. Group Home Worker (1989 – 1991)
10. Grad School Teaching Assistant (1991- 1993)
11. Case Manager (1993 – 1999)
12. Creative Writing Instructor (Miami University 1994 – 2015)
13. Quality Assurance Coordinator (1999 – 2010)
14. Summer Writing Instructor (Kenyon University 2000 – 2002)
15. Vocational Coordinator (2010 – 2017)
16. Project Manager and Lead (2017 – 2026)