Retirement
A retirement gift for the first week with nothing to do: write the book
Most people retire with a sentence they have said for a decade: "I should write it all down." The first quiet Monday is when that sentence either becomes a book or goes away. This is the gift that catches it, by asking rather than waiting for them to type.
What you give
A listener, a message from you, and in time a book.
A thirty-second message from you, played at the first visit. If colleagues want in, a message from the team works beautifully alongside it.
Visits by voice, fifteen to twenty minutes, as often as they like. Retirement is the one time in life when three visits a week is easy. The interviewer starts with the first job and works forward, following the stories that have energy in them.
A memoir that forms chapter by chapter: the work, the people, the near-disasters, what they knew that nobody wrote down. In their words, with every recording theirs, printed when they say so.
How to give it
4 steps. You do the first one.
Buy it once. One payment, nothing that renews, and the book is theirs to give to whoever they like.
Record your message. Name the story from their working life you have heard a hundred times and still want in full.
"Dad, you've told the story about the night shift and the flood at every dinner since 1994. I'd love to have the whole thing, and everything else from those years, in a book."
Give it at the leaving do or the family dinner, and suggest the first visit for the first Monday of retirement, a specific date, so the day has a shape.
Ask their old colleagues for questions. People who worked beside someone for twenty years know which stories to ask for.
Questions to start with
Ask one. Then follow it.
Written for the person telling the story. The full list is at questions to ask your parents about their work.
- What was your first day at your first real job like, and who showed you the ropes?
- What did you make, fix, sell or run that you were proudest of?
- Which boss changed how you worked, for better or worse?
- What was the closest thing to a disaster, and how was it kept quiet?
- What did you know how to do that nobody is going to know how to do now?
- Which colleague became a friend for life, and how?
- What did the work cost you at home, and would you do it the same way?
- What do you want to do now that work never left room for?
If they are not sure
It is theirs to accept, or leave.
Retirees who say "I'm done talking about work" usually mean it for about six weeks. Do not push. Suggest the visits start somewhere else, with childhood or the house or the first car, and that the working years can come when they are ready. If the whole idea is unwelcome, it is their retirement and their call; the gift sits unused without costing anything more.
Tellforth
The best gift is being asked.
Everything else is a way of saying so.
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