Her Retirement

 

 

Two weeks after she graduated from Wheeler High School, Lori got a job.

That was June of 1979.

Jimmy Carter was President.  The average price per gallon for gas was around ninety cents.  The most popular movie was "The Amityville Horror". The radio played songs like "Bad Girls", "Ring My Bell", and "The Logical Song".

Her parents were all for it.  Her mother told her that she would soon marry a boy who would make enough money for her to stay at home and raise the kids.

Oops.

So, while her friends and classmates enjoyed the summer off before starting college, Lori did something else. 

Lori went to work in the front office at a Browning Manufacturing warehouse. Browning (a division of Emerson Electric) made power transmission parts, and Lori's warehouse shipped them out. 

She never stepped foot inside a college classroom.  She never had a term paper due or had to read a book for English Lit. She never had to take an elective. 

She never experienced Sorority rush.  She never pledged. She never went to a mixer. She was never pinned.

Unlike her classmates, Lori didn't have a Christmas break or a summer break because she had a job.

She lived with her parents, her brother, and her sister in a little East Marietta subdivision known as Red Oak Park. 

She was able to save enough to buy a car.  A red Chevette. 

She stayed at that job for over 19 years.

In the meantime, she married me.  She still had the job.

Soon it was Lori and Me and Ben-Ben makes three.

Total time away from work, not including paid time off: 6 weeks after the baby was born. Then Lori went back to work.  That's how they did things back then.

She left that job to become an executive assistant to the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a building and design firm.  She worked there from 1998 to 2009.

When things were good at the building and design firm, things were really good, like the Christmas parties.  However, there were some bad things.

One day, she got a call from a job site.  An elevator inspector was killed in an accident. 

Another time, an executive she supported was killed in an airplane crash.

Another time, a colleague committed suicide. 

The cherry on top was the owner and the firm being investigated by the FBI  and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI). It is a long story. Lori was interviewed by the FBI and MBI simply because she submitted timecards for people working in the field. Lori wasn't in trouble, but she was on the government's subpoena list. The United States of America cut a deal with the owner of the firm before the case went to trial. 
 

Wheeler High School never prepared her for that.

She moved on to a Medical documentation tech firm in 2009. She was the executive assistant to the Owner/CEO. 

That firm was bought by another tech firm, Nuance,  in 2012. Then that firm was bought by another tech firm you might have heard of in 2021.

Microsoft.

She started with a small company she would have to explain to everyone and finished at a company that needed no explanation. 

She always has regretted not going to college. She would always wonder out loud what she would have majored in. While graduating from college is a feather in a cap, it was not a cap Lori needed. 

She has skills they don't teach in college. She worked with a lot of people from different backgrounds and got along with all of them. She worked with doctors, nurses, and construction managers. She worked with building superintendents. She worked with other admins that were older and some that were younger.  She worked with medical school graduates, night school graduates, and Ivy League graduates. 

She would go to the warehouse in the middle of the night to box up and ship a part because some plant was shut down.

She would take a million calls to change flight arrangements. The most memorable one was when she had to arrange a flight for an executive who was in Chicago to take a flight to Birmingham, Alabama due to the death of his mother. At five o'clock on a Friday afternoon.

She would know how to talk to her fellow admins off the ledge when work got a little too much.

For a Southern Baptist, she knew how to celebrate Diwali. 

I told her that quote from Woody Allen: "90% of success in life is just showing up".  I heard her tell her colleagues that during a virtual going-away party.

Lori showed up.

Now, she doesn't have to.