We were having dinner last night, me, my wife and my son, and the joke going round was how I'd cope in retirement without anyone asking me things. With my last working day nearly here, people have started queuing up to get the last of what's in my head before it walks out the door, and I've been making a great show of being put upon about it.
June 2026 : 4 min read - Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.
I've been hamming it up. The heavy sigh at the laptop, the look that says "stupid question of the day" when a message lands, the increasingly frustrated conversations over Teams. I tell anyone who'll listen I'm being squeezed like the last of the toothpaste. Most of the questions aren't hard, and a fair share of the answers are common sense. But turning common sense into something that sounds like insight has more or less been my job for three decades, so I answer them anyway, and I put on the exasperation while I do it.
The running gag last night was simple. Who would I have left to be frustrated at? No colleagues lobbing questions over the partition, no meeting where I get to be the one who's read the data. Just me, and a wife trying to work while I hover around a quiet house. Was I going to start cross-examining the bloke at the tip about his recycling rules? The delivery driver about which route he took to get here? My son found this funnier than I did, which tells you how the evening went.
What the grumpiness is covering
Some of the impatience is real and fairly dull. I want it to be over. After months of deciding and a long run-in, the questions land as one more thing between me and the finish line, and I'd be lying if I said the sighing was all an act.
But the louder I play the put-upon expert, the more I suspect I'm covering for something I like rather less. Being asked is being needed. For thirty-plus years, people coming to me with questions has been the daily proof that I was useful, that there was a reason I was in the room. The frustration and the flattery were the same feeling. I only ever admitted to the frustration.
So the joke about having no one left to annoy has a colder version sitting under it. It isn't really who I'll be frustrated at. It's whether I'll feel needed by anyone once the questions stop, and who I am when nobody's asking.
There's an absurd edge to it as well. No one has been hired to do my job after I go. My new boss has spent the last few weeks trying to download my head before it disappears out the door. Urgently valuable, evidently not worth replacing, both true at the same time. On 26 June the urgency just ends. The phone goes quiet, and it has nothing to do with whether I mattered. The structure that made me matter has simply moved on without me.
For now I'll keep up the put-upon sighing and answering the questions, because in a few weeks there won't be any to answer. The worry is that come August I'll be the one quietly emailing my old team to ask if there's anything they need me to look at. I'm not going to test that theory until the camera and the overgrown garden have had their turn first.
Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.
Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk. He is not a financial adviser. All content reflects his own experience and research and should be taken as a starting point for your own thinking, not as professional advice.
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