So here we are, Friday as promised. Yet more questions. It was an interesting measure of my retirement satisfaction over the weekend while I waited for Leeds Education to respond to my expression of interest. Just what was I hoping they would say? Yes, we have the job for you, we need you very much or no, you’re an irrelevance and no job for you. Stay retired.
I will confess, as I thought about my situation over these two days, I varied from wondering mildly about what I was doing to outright panic about setting myself (and others) for failure. What on earth was I playing at? You’ve been writing retirement blogs about being retired for seven years and mostly you’ve been OK with your retired lifestyle. Not ecstatic but fairly content. Probably as content as I was, on the whole, before I retired. I am not by default a contented person
I have to say, in this state of some confusion, there was very little of the ‘I really hope they offer me a job’, thinking. Or, it would be really nice to feel wanted again. No, I was pretty clear that I didn’t think I could do the job I used to do and didn’t want to go back. But given that this was the closest to being offered a job in the last seven years as I have come, it was slightly confusing. On the whole though, I didn’t want a job.
It would therefore be sod’s law that they would offer me a job all dressed up in ‘we really want you back’ wrapping. So let me cut to the chase. On Monday morning just to prolong the confusion they did indeed kind of offer me a job. The good news is that it was so far from a) what I had anticipated and b) what I wanted, that it was laughably easy to withdraw my expression of interest.
I have to say that whether when it came right down to the wire they would actually have offered me a job, I cannot now say but it felt like they may have had I continued to express an interest.
I’m not quite clear what I thought the job would have been, some kind of Zoom counselling I suppose. Can’t imagine they would have me making masked visits to schools which was the kind of face to face work I enjoyed, but some form of counselling seemed probable. I wasn’t super confident I could do this but it was close enough to what I used to do that I could give it a go for 13 weeks.
But that was not to be. The job they were lining up was for statutory assessments (they have another name now and I have no idea how close in form this new process is to the old one but, I imagine, close enough – I think). If there was one part of the job I really didn’t like for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, statutory assessments would be it. Furthermore I wasn’t very good at it.
So, as I said in my email response to their description of the job ‘offer’, it was very easy for me to say thanks, but no thanks. And there it finished. There was no return email saying well, come back anyway and do something you like. After 2 days of high intensity wondering about what my future held, it was just – blank, nothing, all finished, back to my steady retirement life.
You’ve heard the term, mixed emotions? Well I cannot remember a time in my life when my emotions have been anything other than mixed. A pleasurable happening mixed with a word of caution or a miserable event combined with me looking for the silver lining. That’s just the way it’s always seemed to be for me.
And here, once more, there was a hint of disappointment mixed in with a huge amount of relief at having avoided making an (old) fool of myself. But I’ll tell you this, the proportion of pleasure to pain was something like 95% to 5% in favour of relief. Now I can go back to my largely pleasant retirement life safe in the knowledge that I tried to do the right thing, I tried to be a good citizen and they didn’t want me. So I guess my conscience is clear and that’s a rare state in itself.