Retirement

Guy reads contractual information and advises against retirement.

Transcript

Welcome to the one-hundred-and-fourth episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from the centre of London. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 27th of January 2025.

We are sponsored this week by The Maywentery Golf Course. Welcoming men of all abilities since 1923. The club has temporarily had to close because of the flooding on hole seven. After what happened to Garry last week it’s deemed to be too dangerous to allow access. Garry’s body has been found but has not yet been recovered, and it isn’t appropriate to play around him. It’s like a par 15 hole now anyway, no fun at all. I’ve been asked to read the following on behalf of The Maywentery Golf Course, pertaining to paragraph 7b from members’ contracts: [cough] quote. “Force Majeure. The Member's obligation to pay all membership fees, dues and charges under this Membership Agreement shall remain in full force and effect notwithstanding any event of force majeure that may render the Golf Course, in whole or in part, unusable or inaccessible for the use and enjoyment of golf and country club activities, including, without limitation:
(i) acts of God, such as, but not limited to, fires, explosions, earthquakes, drought, tidal waves, floods, and other natural disasters;
(ii) war, hostilities (whether war be declared or not), invasion, act of foreign enemies, mobilization, requisition, or embargo;
(iii) rebellion, revolution, insurrection, or military or usurped power, or civil war;
(iv) contamination by radio-activity from any nuclear fuel, or from any nuclear waste from the combustion of nuclear fuel, radio-active toxic explosive, or other hazardous properties of any explosive nuclear assembly or nuclear component of such assembly;
(v) riot, commotion, strikes, go slows, lock outs or disorder, unless solely restricted to employees of the Club;
(vi) acts or threats of terrorism; and
(vii) any other events or circumstances beyond the reasonable control of the Club, including, but not limited to, inclement weather, natural disasters, acts of governmental authorities, and widespread disease, epidemic or pandemic.

In the event any such force majeure occurrence renders the Golf Course and Club Facilities unusable in whole or in part, the Member shall not be entitled to any refund or abatement of membership fees, dues or charges. The Member's obligation to pay such amounts when due shall remain absolute and unconditional, without any right of set-off, counterclaim, abatement, suspension, deduction or defense for any reason whatsoever, including by reason of any such force majeure event. End paragraph. I think that is pretty unequivocal.

The clubhouse at The Maywentery Golf Course is also temporarily closed, but members can use the vending machine near the entrance, which is fully stocked with soft drinks, crisps and suchlike.

The police have also asked me to remind listeners who play this podcast at three times the normal speed to not do this while operating machinery or driving. A minority of people apparently speed up everyday activities in line with podcast speeds and lose all conception of time and space. You do not want to be pushing 90mph in a 30mph zone, especially with these icy mornings we’ve been having.

Unfortunately I have to begin today’s podcast with a rather serious topic. If you’re listening with children you might want to turn the volume down for a couple of minutes as I’m about to say twt. Jim Davidson on Wednesday evening tweeted my personal mobile number and encouraged his followers to quote, “destroy the stupid little girly twt.” End quote. This is now a police matter and the five-times divorcee and problem drinker will answer for his increasingly reckless behaviour. As I’ve explained previously, my voice sounds more feminine on this podcast than in real life, and this should be rectified when we move to our new studio next week.

We’ve had some great emails about networking and it sounds like you’re having a lot of success. Chris Baker has written in to say that he’s an intern at Mckinsey and that, on Tuesday lunchtime, the lift he was lunching in in London was so full of networking interns that the alarm went off because of the excess weight. Given the popularity of this podcast, this was bound to happen and you’ll need to network in shifts. We do not want a lift failing and killing dozens of Mckinsey interns. Jonathan Dickson, a KPMG intern in Atlanta, has written in to say that he breakfasts in the elevator, which is what they call a lift in America, as he’s found the partners there receptive to early-morning chats, and that he buys extra lattes to give to Senior Partners. That’s the thing about networking - you always need to look for new and creative ways to be seen, especially as an intern. The connections you make today will be the basis for your whole career, and if you’re not seen your career will in all likelihood be a failure.

Our topic this week is Retirement. It was something I was planning to cover during our live show in Torquay later in the year, due to audience demographics, but Torquay has cancelled us and so I’ve decided to bring the episode forward. For listeners who are unfamiliar, demographics is a word meaning statistics defining a population and their characteristics. I introduce the topic of retirement by way of a quotation from Mr. Cal Newport: Open quotation. Jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. End quotation.

Work provides me with every joy that I can imagine, and unstructured free time, as Mr. Newport points out, is chaos. It is entropy. Free time is when the devil does his business. 

A 2008 analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research, no less, found that retirement is associated with increases in difficulties with mobility, illness conditions, and declines in mental health. Retirement, per science, is weakness. Look at 94-year-old Warren Buffet, or 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch. The devil gets nowhere near these two greats because they refuse to go gentle into that good night. Rupert Murdoch - now there’s a man with a clear sense of right-wing mental health, and I’m sure his latest wife can attest that his bedroom mobility is practically unlimited! Sorry … I don’t like innuendo especially sexual innuendo, and I was clearly suggesting that Mr. Murdoch is still a vibrant performer at sex, which I’m sure is true but is also disrespectful. Nobody needs to be imagining Mr. Murdoch’s 93-year-old body gyrating like a dusty electric doll, his elastic face contorted in ejaculatory ecstasy.

When I was at Carpet Culture I got to know Ross Manley who was for many years the Chief Colour Officer there. He anticipated carpet trends like no other and heavily influenced the bold and bright colours of the 1990’s Britpop era in the UK, including being the inspiration for Primal Scream’s Screamadelica album cover; show Ross any interior wall and he’d immediately know which colour carpet to put in the room. He hated wooden floors with a passion, and in his later years refused to walk on them. He would set fire to vinyl floors whenever he could get away with it. I attended Ross’s retirement party on August 11 2023 and he literally dropped dead on Monday 14 August 2023, his first official day of retirement. His funeral, exactly one week after his retirement party, was actually more fun in many ways - we were all dressed in our favourite carpet colours and Ross’s coffin was lined with the most beautiful turquoise blue carpet, the colour that he’d essentially invented for commercial carpet use in 1997. It was the most fitting tribute to a truly talented man … Unfortunately Ross Manley was also a weak man who failed to rage against the dying of the light. His talents faded in the 21st century, like a Kodak photograph left out in the sun, and by the time of my internship it was clear that his instincts as well as his eyesight were failing and he’d lost entirely whatever it was that made him such a pioneer.

So the best I can recommend for retirement is to somehow recreate the structure that work provides; the goals, feedback, rules and challenges. A properly-organised pub quiz can provide this. But beyond that, I don’t see many options for retirement structure. I know Ross was estranged from most of his family and that his main companions were his goldfish. Very sad. He really had the most beautiful green fish though, which all had to be euthanized and eaten after his death. He had his allotment too, and grew the most stunning rainbow carrots there; purple, yellow, red, as well as the traditional orange. But Ross’s story, though perhaps an extreme example, is a warning for interns considering an end to your working life. You might in fact be precipitating the end of your actual life. 

I’ve been your host, Guy Snapdragon. Legal support from Michael Webb and Accountancy from Graham Cree. May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely.