How To Retire 6 Months Every Year
(Page 21 of 22)
May/June 1970
By Irv Thomas
Also in the large metropolitan area, if you look in the yellow pages under 'Shopping Services', you'll get a lead to another interesting - if poorly paid - occupation. Sometimes also listed under Detective Agencies, store shoppers are the people who unobtrusively go from firm to firm making purchases with company money simply to see that it's properly rung into the cash register. They travel between stores - and frequently between towns - in company cars, as a group, but do their work individually or in pairs. The pay is low, but out of town expenses are covered, and the daily route usually includes one or two eating spots for a free lunch. Turnover is high, and it's partially deliberate to keep shoppers from being spotted too often. The job is easy to get, it's fun and interesting.
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One kind of work with a conveniently built-in transiency factor and an unbeatable environment is the resort circuit. You can take your choice - summer or winter - sea or ski, mountain or desert. Cooks, bartenders, maids, waitresses, desk clerks, handymen and specialties like life guards, social directors and baby sitters are in demand. Experience is preferred but there are often last minute or emergency mid-season openings when they'll take the first halfway reasonable choice they can get. These are 4 to 6 month jobs that usually provide room and board and also pay an additional $200 to $400 or more. It's a wonderful opportunity for a change from the city. The food is usually good to excellent, and employees can use the resort's facilities during their free time. The short-term aspect of the job should entitle you to immediate unemployment pay and you can work both ends of the circuit, as many people do. Usually one or two employment agencies in a large city - particularly near a resort area - will specialize in this type of placement. The action begins about a month before the season starts and lasts right up to the last minute and beyond.
These are offered not so much as suggestions, but as assurances for those of you still fearful about leaving the good old security of the good old rat-race. Even if your present occupation does not have transient or part-time possibilities, such qualities are not hard to find.
I think, however, that within six months your entire approach will alter - as mine has - in a way that you can't possibly now envision and I suggest you ride loose on the question of employment. Without being pressured to earn in order to buy, so many things become possible.
WHAT COMES AFTER?
This brings us to the very edge of the great unknown. I cannot really write the end of this article. I can only speculate upon it, for I have not yet crossed into that promised land. But I have though about the question enough to know that I am going to experience something far more deep and significant than merely free, unstructured time.
Consider, for a moment, the last occasion you looked forward to a broad expanse of unstructured time. For me it was summer vacations in junior high school, about 30 years ago. By high school, those vacations had already been converted to summer classes and jobs. It is difficult to recall - but I am able to remember - the fluid sense of joy and life which arrived with the last day of the school year. Three months was a significant portion of a lifetime at that age.
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