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. 

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