Career Change


After retiring about 31 months ago from the Santa Clara County Probation Department, the monotony of doing not much of anything has really gotten under my skin. My days have been filled with too much TV, sleeping, web surfing and reading. It was satisfactory for awhile but no more!  TV has been my biggest vice To give you an example of how much time I have wasted... I have watched every episode of Mad Men, The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, Justified, Revolution, Person of Interest, Boardwalk Empire, The Americans, Homeland, Southland, Brooklyn 99, Chicago Fire, The Blacklist and Duck Dynasty to name a few. I also admit to watching The Ellen Show, 287 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and countless old westerns on TMC. 

I also spend as much time as possible with our five, soon to be six grandchildren. I’m involved with my church and I write quite a lot for this blog and what will (hopefully) be a book of my memoirs someday.  But I now need something new to take up this huge amount of time I enjoy as a retiree. 

So tomorrow I will start a job as a cab driver for Urban Taxi. I have no idea how much business I’ll get in this Stanislaus County town of 70,000 people with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the state. But I think it’ll will be fun. I envision driving elderly folks to their doctor appointments, the grocery store and bridge club, taking happy people up to the casinos near here, or getting intoxicated people safely home from the bars. My cousin advised me that most of my work will involve “taking tweekers to their connections to score dope.”  He’s a “glass half empty” guy. I told him it doesn’t matter who I transport as long as they pay the fare. 

I asked the Turlock Police Officer who issued my permit today if there has been very many robberies of taxi drivers in this town. She said there has never been one in her eleven years on the job. Hopefully, the record will remain unsullied for another eleven years, at least. 

Everyone I have told about this job have said, “That will be such a good job for you!” I wonder what they mean by this. Do they think that my personality fits the job? Or, are they thinking that I’d be good at driving around eating Cheetos, drinking Cokes, watching Netflix on my iPhone and sleeping in my taxi under a tree somewhere? Well that beats eating Cheetos, drinking Cokes, watching Netflix and sleeping at home, I guess. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Sample Court Report

I have felt like writing lately so I will continue to do so. After yesterday's post regarding my early life, I thought some of you might like to know a bit about what I did as a vocation. I have received a number of compliments regarding my writing ability for which I am grateful. Most people do not know that for many years as a Probation Officer, I wrote reports for the Court. In this job I got a lot of practice as an "Indentured Wordsmith." The following is a fictional account of one such report. The defendant in this case was convicted of attempted robbery. In addition to all the other information required by the Court, the reports I wrote contained information resulting from my own investigation including my interviews of the victim and defendant. Most of the report is who, what, why, where and how, but in the evaluation section, I got to throw in my opinion about what consequences the guy should get. Keep in mind, the defendant had already been convicted which inc
Read more

The Driver

After church this morning I was approached in the foyer by a young man I calculated to be in his mid-thirties. He said he was a visitor and his name was Mike. I learned he is the son-in-law of one of the churches elders and I reckon I was pointed out by someone so he came over to talk to me. Mike said,” I really like reading your blog.” He said it makes him laugh and cry and that some of it is entertaining. Mike mentioned a couple of the entries, one of which included the one about Rick Criscione and I going to Mario’s. He went on to say he hopes I’ll continue to write it. I told him that as long as I can think of things to write about, I will do so. His encouragement has led me to write today’s entry. Back in the summer of 1978, I bought a car from my mother’s friends for $300 and it was one of the coolest rides I have ever owned. It was a 1964 Chrysler New Yorker and somewhere along the way one of my friends dubbed it the “Stanmobile.” To this day, whenever someone talks about tha
Read more
After I retired last year I quickly found myself sitting around with nothing to do. I was bored and unmotivated to find stuff to occupy my time. I watched a lot of TV and surfed the web. Well, I thought that was bad, but this past couple of days have been even worse. I am lethargic and practically non-ambulatory. I realize this is not healthy but I don’t really care. Some friends have tried to get me to go out and do something active but I always decline. I’ve missed the past five weeks of church because I don’t want to face people right now. I’m not ready to take on the next wave of sympathy from those I have not seen face to face since Daniel died. I want to be a hermit right now. I can hear Daniel saying, with that little smirk on his face that indicated he was half kidding me, “Hey, Old Man, why are you letting this get to you so much? Suck it up and move on.” My answer to him would be something like, “Because it’s how I want to be right now and I’ll suck it up when I’m good and
Read more