Keeping Busy When Retired - It's Important
When I was 19 years old, I got a very important lesson in why you should keep busy when you're retired. I was just out of high school at the time, and before starting a computer course in the local community college, I had a summer job at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. It was also the hospital where I was born.
My job was to edit data entry forms before they went to the keypunchers, who put the data on those 80 column computer cards that were a popular data input form at the time. The cards were generated from these "source document" forms. It was about this time that my dad and his two sisters were convincing my grandfather (his dad) that he should close the shoe repair shop he'd operated for decades, and finally just retire. When he closed the shop, it made headlines in the local newspaper, since his was the last business in Rochester that actually bought steam from the local electric company. The steam operated the rotating brushes and buffers he used to shine the shoes in his shop.
A week or two later, he went into the hospital "simply for routine tests" (Strong Memorial, as it happens), and the problem is he came out "feet first." He simply gave up living because he no longer had anything to do in retirement. I had to edit the form for the keypunchers when his body was transferred from the ward he was on to ward K1, the morgue.
Now that I'm retired, I'm a volunteer at a local space museum in Cape Canaveral and, on any given launch day, you can find me in Space View Park in Titusville, Florida where I give a lecture at 30 minutes before launch, and put the launch provider's webcast on the guitar amplifier I bring to the park when the webcast starts up at T-minus 15 minutes. This is why I live in Titusville, just to watch rockets launch into space. And to stay busy, of course.