My Retirement

Today is the last day of my career in Government, which came in two parts (1971-92 and 2003-now), separated by 11 years in the Private Sector.

I have had the wonderful opportunity to have worked with many talented, dedicated, and otherwise great people (present company included). I’ve admired your dedication and expertise, and am grateful for all your help and support. I’ll miss our daily contact (which, I’m told, is both a cost and a benefit of retirement).

As is probably the case with everyone who retires, I have mixed feelings. I “learned how to work” in a family business that put a premium on doing stuff timely: County fair carnivals have pretty much evening hours, and if I didn’t make sure every person who wanted to ride my Tilt-a-Whirl got to do so *THAT NIGHT* (and got a good ride), I wasn’t doing my job. It might rain tomorrow night.

With this background, I’m sure no one is surprised coming to work for the Federal Government was, um, a major adjustment for me. For better or worse (more the latter than the former, to be sure), I never really made that adjustment: I’m just as impatient to get stuff done as I was in 1971, even though I know very well the “pace” at which things happen here. (In my Private-Sector sojourn, the “pace” was considerably different and impatience was more of a virtue.)

At any rate, from this perspective, I’m disappointed in my lack of success with the important stuff I’ve worked on in the past few years; it remains so, very, far from complete. This is not to say I don’t thinkthe work I’ve done isn’t important–it has value, even if it doesn’t have results.

Be that as it may, I will be continuing Web Analytics activities as Chair of the Web Analytics Association’s Public Sector Special Interest Group; the WAA also needs continued kicking to do better work to foster and support Analytics in Government and in other non-profits. So, I may turn up at Government and non-Government conferences as a speaker, instructor, or gadfly. And, I might get lucky and pick up a little consulting piecework in Analytics somewhere along the line.

Also, I’ll stay involved with The Vagabond Players, a community theatre here in Baltimore (whose web site http://vagabondplayers.org/ I’ve promised to redesign). I may even get back on stage sometime and do something
other than build/strike sets.

I will, of course, still lurk here at GovLoop, too.

All of this combined, however, will not remotely resemble a full-time job. Carol and I (and the dog) are looking forward to more than just rushed weekends in Chincoteague, and will be doing some travel as well. Having retired 15 months ago, she assures me “we” won’t have trouble filling my time. And, being a former high school English teacher, she’s giving me Existentialism lessons about the meaning of all this.