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Three shifts before retirement
Jul. 1st, 2010 11:52 amMy mother has just three shifts to work before retirement. Three shifts before retirement is, of course, a dangerous time for workers, when they are most likely to be shot while trying to save their partner, Mel Gibson, from investigating something that's bigger than both of them. But my mother doesn't live in an 80s action film, so her co-workers will probably just make her a cake instead.
I know she is looking forward to retiring, but I think she will miss it. She says she won't, but I think she will. Buildings get in your bones, and she has worked at the City by the Sea's public hospital since she was 17: she did her training there, back when student nurses actually lived in the hospital, and worked as a theatre nurse. Then she travelled for a few years, working in hospitals around Australia, before coming back when she was 27 or 28. She's just turned 60, so that's about 33 consecutive years of working in the same building, longer if the training years are included. I can't imagine that. I've worked in my job for five years and my feet are getting itchy. Then again, my job will always be the same, where she's worked in different wards over the years, so that probably keeps things interesting.
Anyway, she says she is not going to do anything for a month and then she will find out about becoming a volunteer at Flagstaff Hill, which is a colonial village/museum. Her friend wants her to help at the tea shop there. So that should keep her off the streets and (I hope) dressed in colonial costume. I have been saying she should take up lawn bowls or Bingo or playing the pokies*, like proper old people, and she has instructed me to euthanase her if it comes to that. Got it. From there, she said, it is a short step to Hoy or Come And Do, two mysterious things which occupied my grandmother in the later years of her life.
( Hoy! )
What else? Oh, I love the illustration for this news story. A giant whale with teeth chomping on another whale! The artist must have been so excited to get that commission.
I forgot to say yesterday that while I was reading the magazine headlines in the supermarket queue, I picked up Girlfriend magazine (for the tweens) and took a quiz to find out if I have OBD, Obsessive Beiber Disorder. Turns out I don't. Phew. That can be fatal.
* Poker machines
I know she is looking forward to retiring, but I think she will miss it. She says she won't, but I think she will. Buildings get in your bones, and she has worked at the City by the Sea's public hospital since she was 17: she did her training there, back when student nurses actually lived in the hospital, and worked as a theatre nurse. Then she travelled for a few years, working in hospitals around Australia, before coming back when she was 27 or 28. She's just turned 60, so that's about 33 consecutive years of working in the same building, longer if the training years are included. I can't imagine that. I've worked in my job for five years and my feet are getting itchy. Then again, my job will always be the same, where she's worked in different wards over the years, so that probably keeps things interesting.
Anyway, she says she is not going to do anything for a month and then she will find out about becoming a volunteer at Flagstaff Hill, which is a colonial village/museum. Her friend wants her to help at the tea shop there. So that should keep her off the streets and (I hope) dressed in colonial costume. I have been saying she should take up lawn bowls or Bingo or playing the pokies*, like proper old people, and she has instructed me to euthanase her if it comes to that. Got it. From there, she said, it is a short step to Hoy or Come And Do, two mysterious things which occupied my grandmother in the later years of her life.
( Hoy! )
* * * * *
What else? Oh, I love the illustration for this news story. A giant whale with teeth chomping on another whale! The artist must have been so excited to get that commission.
* * * * *
I forgot to say yesterday that while I was reading the magazine headlines in the supermarket queue, I picked up Girlfriend magazine (for the tweens) and took a quiz to find out if I have OBD, Obsessive Beiber Disorder. Turns out I don't. Phew. That can be fatal.
* Poker machines