Here’s to the Ladies (and Gentlemen) Who Lunch!

Once you have survived your first few weeks of retirement, out there meeting new people, making new friends, learning something new and exciting …. you are allowed to call your former, non-retired work mates and arrange to meet for lunch.  After all, didn’t everyone at your retirement party make you promise to keep in touch? 

And didn’t you promise that “as long as you weren’t too busy”, that you would?

Another mad retiree tip – don’t burn any bridges at that retirement party or when finally leaving your place of full-time career employment for that last time.  (Especially if you worked in, say an academic department at Ryerson.  Two of the most important things you will need when you retire are (a) human contact and (b) activities and play dates.  And for a little while at least, Ryerson can provide both.  But more about that in a future post.)

Regardless of how well you actually got along with some of your fellow, now, former worker bees, a lunch (or two) with former work mates can help ease you into the loss of structure in your life that retirement brings, while at the same time, helping you to establish a new structure.

Basically lunch with former colleagues gives you the opportunity to write an actual appointment in your day timer.  (The pretty one you bought at the Boxing Day sales …. ?)

And also, for a little while at least, you are a novelty to your department contemporaries – someone who got “out”.    And to the young ones who were invariably hired after you have left, you are a curiosity – some “old” person that used to work there.  So someone will return those initial telephone calls and e-mails and agree to meet you for lunch. 

And lunching with former co-workers will be a novelty for you as well because they will spend the better part of the lunch hour discussing projects you are no longer involved with nor bear any responsibility for – which is a very odd, but strangely satisfying sensation.

And that first (and perhaps only) lunch with former co-workers will actually help give you a sense of closure. 

Your (former) co-workers will be going back to work at the end of the hour …. and you will not. 

And the reason you will not be returning to the office …. you are officially retired.

Be warned, though - your being retired adds a new, tricky dimension to your relationship with your former co-workers … an ongoing employee/retiree relationship may not be sustainable.  “Work friends” may not translate in “friend friends” once you are retired and they are not. 

You will need to prepare yourself for this “loss”.