Early riser

It's good to be retired. It's good to be able to sleep in past my usual 4:00 AM waking time. Yep, I got up that early. I'm a natural early riser, but I'm also nervous. Some days I'd just lay in bed, my thoughts hurtling through my brain like a tornado until getting up. What's the point of just lying there with my mind spinning? I found after retirement that almost all my anxieties came from my job and people I worked with.

I'm going through some of my favorite entries for Paranoia Strikes Deep. Here are three that relate to my former jobs, former bosses and coworkers.

In 2006 I wrote about what we used to call Secretaries Day, because as much as I loved working with secretaries (that's me in the picture on top schmoozing one of the lovely women I encountered every day on the job, heh-heh) I resented that secretaries got a day to honor them and the rest of us rank and file workers didn't. And of course there is the absolute worst day of all, Bosses Day. My friend Dave called this entry my rant about bosses. Re-reading it I can see, yeah, he's right.

When it comes to work you don't have a choice of coworkers, nor do you usually have a choice of bosses. In some cases I've been lucky with both, in other cases not so lucky.

Two of the most interesting--and obnoxious--coworkers I ever had were on a minimum wage shit job for a dried food plant. I got laid off in 1974 and found a much better job with a school district, but I never forgot these two characters, Horrible Howard and Jerky Jerry.

I also never forgot Grunt, my coworker in 1976. He was a biker so interesting I used two entries for him. The first is here, and the second is here.

I have included two of the cartoon strips I drew in 1979 and '80 about Grunt. I notice that I placed Grunt, who I worked with at the school district, back in my old food plant job. I guess I saw him as belonging to the shit job more than the school district job.

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