I learned yesterday that my political position at BDS, which has steeply declined the past three years, has just taken another bump downward. Each January since 1998 I have worked with the Big Boss to prepare his address to a major local industry group for their annual dinner. I've just been advised that my services will not be required next month.

Fine. I never enjoyed it. But it was a lot of work, and generated a lot of email traffic/documentation that was useful when I was hauled before management twice a year to justify my existence. Without it, my organizational niche is increasingly exposed, precarious.

BDS is, fortunately, a slow, saurian undertaking. I figure it will be another year at minimum before they move on me, and another year after that, if I do not resist, before they force me out. Should I enlist legal assistance (the spousette, who has some experience in workplace issues) I'm confident I can spin the thing out.

Recently I've been thinking of bailing on 04/01/19 (American style). If I do so, the BDS defined benefits plan (to which maybe half a dozen of us in this entire building are entitled) will pay me a handsome annual stipend of x. As I crunch the numbers, I find that I can bail not quite two years before that for .975x.

Of course, the mortgage won't be paid off until 2023 (probably more like 2021, given the couple of C-notes I add to each monthly payment), and since x, the pension, is about four-fifths of y, the salary, and given the rather, ahem, irregular (read negligible) spousal income this decade, I might do well to grit my teeth and try to hang on until 2019, but if management gets beastly, I'm pretty sure I can dig in my heels for long enough to sprint outta here thirty months from now. I can always take a gig as a WalMart greeter until the mortgage is paid.

cordially,

Problem is, demand for my "services" has declined rather steeply since the departure of the last Good Boss (ah, that was a gratifying run: almost nine years of Good Bosses, including the legendary JPL). I have one long-term project that will occupy as much time as I opt to give it over the next couple of years, and it's something the institution will take some benefit from, even if the current generation of managers is indifferent, and if I pull it off I'll have left something significant (in the context of FCT&D/BDS) behind me, which is more than most of my colleagues will be able to say. But times past, I was good for three, four, half a dozen high-profile one-offs each year of the sort that would make my masters say, "Gad, we're lucky to have him!" and sometimes result in a modest Christmas bonus in the pay envelope. I don't see those days coming again, and oddly I find myself rather missing that sense of being useful. Mind you, I keep depositing the paychecks.

I've re-crunched the numbers, and find that retirement at .975x is actually not feasible until early in the second quarter of 2018. It's a long time to keep one's head down.

cordially,

(Twenty years ago FCT&D was saddled with an additional San Francisco office across town, a wholly gratuitous layer of management flab that has since then quintupled in size, and from which not a calories of useful work has ever been observed to emerge. The Big Boss there, a malignant character, retired one Friday and returned in the same capacity the following Monday as a "consultant" at higher compensation while simultaneously drawing a handsome retirement. We always assumed that the guy had a file drawer full of 8 x 10 color glossies that someone in the mothership back east was keen not to see the light of day.)

I call myself an "art director," although that's not my actual job title, and not a "graphic designer" because what I do is largely by way of assembling components created by others. I've done a certain amount of original (albeit usually derivative) work, but my own draughtsmanship is not remotely equal to the standards of commercial illustration.

cordially,