First day of retirement was pretty busy
Jan. 15th, 2026 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nosrednaydujIt was my regularly scheduled square dance night, so I made cookies to bring for celebrating. People offered me my choice of congratulations and condolences, and I wasn't really sure which what I wanted.
I started the day by reading the separation agreement. Because I'm over 40, I am required to receive a list of the job titles and ages of people who were and were not affected by the layoff in my division (no names). Unfortunately, docusign does not let me cut and paste, so if I want to do data processing on this, I will have to take screenshots and OCR. I found myself, "senior software engineer, 65". I found a couple of other people who I knew to have been laid off.
There were about 300 in the division and 34 were laid off. Most of them were over 40, but most of the employees are over 40. There were a number of 20s and 30s laid off, interestingly no 40s, lots of 50s and 60s. Somebody who was laid off was 83! I didn't know we had anybody who was that old working for us. But there's a lot of different projects in the division that I don't know anything about. I also don't know if it's only US employees in the list, and I don't have any idea if people from other countries were laid off. Other countries have stronger employee protections, and so often it's the US who gets hit. At least that was the case when I worked for Harlequin. It's very hard to make somebody redundant in England, while US is "at will".
After lunch I had a bicycle adventure, where I rode 9 miles each way to another used car dealership, where I measured five cars for cargo space and end to end wingspan of the mirrors, folded and unfolded (or noted that there was no power fold). The entry to our garage is narrow, and the Tesla was difficult to get in. Folding mirrors was very helpful.
We will have to take Ken's bicycle to check out some of these cars, but I was able to eliminate a couple by measurements. We also learned that it's possible we don't want to buy from this dealership, because one of their electric cars was at 3% charge, and another one of them was so badly charged that it let us roll down the power windows but then wouldn't roll them up. Which means that these people don't know how to take care of their electric cars, and they are damaging the batteries by not keeping them in the sweet spot of about 60% charged. Also, if I had wanted to test drive either of these vehicles, it would've been trouble. I didn't actually drive any; I just sat in the driver's seat and looked at the controls (and adjusted the seat so that the cargo length measurement would mean something).
The Ford Mustang Mach E is very much competing with Tesla. They have a huge touchscreen and pretty much nothing else for controls. They don't have door handles at all. There is a button that you push and it pops the door out. Happily, the cargo was also too small and so we could eliminate it right off the bat without having to agonize about "I am going to hate driving this car".
Today I'm going to do some rearrangement where I take the monitor from my work computer and put it on my home computer and pack up my work computer and try to figure out what I'm going to do with desk space. I have too much of it if I'm just going to have one workstation. I don't really want to get rid of either of the desks permanently, but we could try to use the space for some storage instead. This house is very weird, because it is very large and has insufficient storage.
And it's going to be a nice day again (thank you climate change), so I will have another bicycle adventure somewhere.
I started the day by reading the separation agreement. Because I'm over 40, I am required to receive a list of the job titles and ages of people who were and were not affected by the layoff in my division (no names). Unfortunately, docusign does not let me cut and paste, so if I want to do data processing on this, I will have to take screenshots and OCR. I found myself, "senior software engineer, 65". I found a couple of other people who I knew to have been laid off.
There were about 300 in the division and 34 were laid off. Most of them were over 40, but most of the employees are over 40. There were a number of 20s and 30s laid off, interestingly no 40s, lots of 50s and 60s. Somebody who was laid off was 83! I didn't know we had anybody who was that old working for us. But there's a lot of different projects in the division that I don't know anything about. I also don't know if it's only US employees in the list, and I don't have any idea if people from other countries were laid off. Other countries have stronger employee protections, and so often it's the US who gets hit. At least that was the case when I worked for Harlequin. It's very hard to make somebody redundant in England, while US is "at will".
After lunch I had a bicycle adventure, where I rode 9 miles each way to another used car dealership, where I measured five cars for cargo space and end to end wingspan of the mirrors, folded and unfolded (or noted that there was no power fold). The entry to our garage is narrow, and the Tesla was difficult to get in. Folding mirrors was very helpful.
We will have to take Ken's bicycle to check out some of these cars, but I was able to eliminate a couple by measurements. We also learned that it's possible we don't want to buy from this dealership, because one of their electric cars was at 3% charge, and another one of them was so badly charged that it let us roll down the power windows but then wouldn't roll them up. Which means that these people don't know how to take care of their electric cars, and they are damaging the batteries by not keeping them in the sweet spot of about 60% charged. Also, if I had wanted to test drive either of these vehicles, it would've been trouble. I didn't actually drive any; I just sat in the driver's seat and looked at the controls (and adjusted the seat so that the cargo length measurement would mean something).
The Ford Mustang Mach E is very much competing with Tesla. They have a huge touchscreen and pretty much nothing else for controls. They don't have door handles at all. There is a button that you push and it pops the door out. Happily, the cargo was also too small and so we could eliminate it right off the bat without having to agonize about "I am going to hate driving this car".
Today I'm going to do some rearrangement where I take the monitor from my work computer and put it on my home computer and pack up my work computer and try to figure out what I'm going to do with desk space. I have too much of it if I'm just going to have one workstation. I don't really want to get rid of either of the desks permanently, but we could try to use the space for some storage instead. This house is very weird, because it is very large and has insufficient storage.
And it's going to be a nice day again (thank you climate change), so I will have another bicycle adventure somewhere.
