Today I'm "FULL RETIREMENT AGE"

How awesome.

But what is even more awesome is that my wonderful brother made it possible for me to go part time at work six months before my full retirement age because he cares for me.   Getting out of the position of being a department head had COMPLETELY CHANGED the way I'm treated at work.

I always knew that the pressures that were put on department heads were generated from a higher level than the local one, but there was no way I could have completely comprehended the EXTREME change in the way that I was to treated to the way I am treated now.   But, the fact of the matter is, now my manager does not have someone calling her up and asking her whether this, that, and the other has been done (by each department head) so that he can check it off on his long, long lists of  DONES.   Micro-managing to the extreme.   Seriously.     And if he wasn't calling her on the phone and asking, he was "in the neighborhood" so we'd have to stop what we were held responsible for getting done and give the store a good going over so that it looked top notch "just in case" he came by and checked on us.

That's all over for me now.  Now I am a helper.  I go in and help everyone else get done those things that are required, but I am not "under the gun".   The only thing I have been given as my own responsibility is to take care of the clearance (which comes from art, hobbies, wearables, jewelry, crafts, party, and the front end).   And I enjoy doing that.    So life at work is back to being "good".

But...  and this is a real change.   I now feel like I have another life besides my work life.  Without all the pressures and stress, wondering how I'm going to get everything done, and so on, when I'm at home, I DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT WORK.    That is a big change because before the responsibility of it all was always weighing on me.   I'd try to figure out just how to hit the floor running, so to speak, so that I could work as quickly and smartly as possible to accomplish the most.  Of course, often it didn't matter, because what I planned was "trashed" for some objective that the manager came up with that had nothing to do with what I was being held accountable for.

Nuff said.  I have to be at work in an hour and twenty minutes.  I'm filling in in fabrics this morning.