It’s really quite strange where ideas for these retirement blogs come from. Admittedly there are obvious sources like the weekend papers as a couple of recent blogs have shown. But take this one, you might think that the ‘bad job’ of the title, refers to the current Covid situation. That seems pretty bad and by all accounts getting worse.
Some people might think the ‘bad’ refers to the complexities of retirement given this is a retirement blog or even old age to which I have alluded recently. Or Brexit, or even the state of the world as a whole. All of the above (and of course they do come together not as separate entities), are genuinely upsetting. So divide and conquer remains one of my favourite tactics for dealing with problems. Tease them apart as I’ve written elsewhere.
Other traditional advice for dealing with life’s problems run along the lines of – reframe a negative as a positive (true I’ve had my handbag stolen but at least that means I don’t have to carry it home). Or the tired old cliché – if life gives you lemons make lemonade. In other words use negatives to develop your resilience. Let the negatives in life help you develop your problem-solving skills and just use the challenges of life generally help you become, you know, a better person all round.
But here’s the thing, my ‘bad’ in this retirement blog does not relate to any of the above what you might call serious things in life. It is based upon a recent and on-going experience of having electricians in our house. The irony of this is that we are, in one way, very glad to have them. That’s because the electrician we were supposed to be hosting didn’t show up at the time he said he would after I had rung to check he was coming when he said. Didn’t show up at all in fact.
That was last Monday, no message, no response to my message or repeated phone calls, just didn’t come and more annoyingly didn’t bother to explain that he wasn’t coming. So that’s why, by the circular route of son-in-law and daughter, we were glad to end up with either one, two or three electricians in our house on Friday.
This all started with the, by now, legendary cooker problem. We had the gas made safe and bought a new cooker, all we needed was the electrics to the cooker (for ignition) to be sorted. That’s all. In the meantime we had a house full of extension cables and no central heating. But here were the men and to repeat myself, all we needed was a bit of the kitchen re-wiring. True, we knew we probably needed a new master board (whatever that is) and true, we knew that, because this new system was ‘more sensitive’, it could throw up other problems.
Well we had the new master-board and it did indeed provide us with a whole new set of problems. To cut a long and shocking story short, it turns out we need the whole of the downstairs mains circuit rewiring. So before they left, with a promise to come back on Monday, the boss explained that they needed to get beneath the floor boards (into what I believe is known as the crawl space – I know there is one because the kids and I used to play hide and seek down there, but that’s another story).
And then it got serious because he was explaining that they might need to cut two trap doors into the floor and that might require removal of the fitted carpet and also possibly a bit of re-plastering and repainting. Hey ho.
So this was our ‘bad’ that we had to make the best of. And this is how we did it. I’m not sure it fits neatly into any of the, earlier described, self-help suggestions, but it worked for us. I suppose it does come into the ‘take control where you can and ignore the bits you can’t’, category.
I believe it doesn’t matter what you’re taking control of or whether it’s relevant to the problem. For example, I shaved my head. Why you ask, well because it did need doing, it was getting to that point when it irritated me. But, more than that, I did it because I could. I took some action and that helps to counteract a bad job.
But, on Friday afternoon, the making the best of it really kicked in. This is what we did then. We all four of us, after the pm walk, went to the pub. We bought a bottle of Shiraz and sat out in the pub ‘garden’ and just sort of kicked back. That was the first action. We came home, avoided the bad bits of the house and lit a fire (the first of the winter). Something very therapeutic about a blazing log fire. Given we have no central heating it was doubly therapeutic. That was the second bit.
Then, when all three of the electricians had left with promises to return on Monday, we ordered up our first Chinese takeaway since before lock-down and found a suitably relaxing film on our Sky Q box. It happened to be Sleepy Hollow. This is a film we’ve seen and enjoyed before. I have to admit it hadn’t stood the test of time but hey, you can’t have all your ‘making the best of it’ strategies work out.
Up to this point we both felt we had done rather well seizing back the initiative. Oh, and finally, I’ve written this retirement blog about it. As children’s author, Michael Rosen, said in the paper this weekend about his coronavirus, near death experience, about which he is writing a book, ‘some of it is about piecing together what happened, because it’s very confusing, so writing enables you to get it in the right kind of order’.
I hope you agree that, getting life in the ‘right kind of order’ by writing about it, definitely helps in the challenge of making the best of a bad job. I shall continue to believe this until next Monday when I’ll probably get the bill for the under-floor, into the crawl-space, escapade, not to mention future prospects of new carpet, re-plastering and re-decorating and any other little knock-on effects that dealing with bad job brings with it.