When we start out in life in our chosen careers, with the glow of youth surrounding us, we care little about pensions, RRSPs’, years of service, or retirement planning. Then suddenly something occurs that slams you into reality, and you are suddenly aware you are growing older. One of those things in my chosen career of nursing, was the arrival each year of our ‘pension printouts’.
I already had an inkling that I was getting older, but that piece of paper sealed my fate!
Other than the fact that my hair was a different color, my desire to stay up half the night disappeared, I was worrying about cholesterol and Hormone Replacement Therapy, I certainly knew I was right when those printouts arrived in the spring of 2000!
The data on those darn things said it all. They listed our pension contributions, retirement date, early retirement dates, optimum retirement dates and various other numbers concerning our ‘financial future’!
I always felt this piece of paper gave us was a reminder that we weren’t getting any younger. However, I also know that’s the negative approach! It was annoying! Basically for a nurse it tells you on that summary readout that you had better get working on RRSPs because you ‘ain’t gonna survive on this’!
For us of the ‘baby boomer’ generation and older, we had no choice but to have broken service because maternity leave was unheard of and if you decided to have a family it was a known and accepted fact that you would stay at home or work part-time. So none of us, even those who had been working for twenty-five years or more would get much of a pension, unless they worked until they were ninety or so, something we learned to laugh about because of the images it conjured up in our minds.
Karen was a young nurse on our unit. She did her work, had two children, a working husband and lots of family support. She planned to work and have a long and full nursing career. Karen and I worked quite a bit together and she did crafts, which she knew drove me berserk, but it was funny! Karen never got flustered easily. She was one of those Type B personalities that enjoyed her life, took things in stride and suffered the irony of being stuck with ‘me’, the one who was the same age as her mother, hated crafts, and managed slow night shifts by continuously cleaning and rearranging the unit. But she tolerated me, tormented me, teased me, and we generally did quite well together.
Then the pension printouts came! I didn’t pay too much attention to mine, having collected so many over the years, but Karen took hers, and a calculator, and sat down to see exactly how the financial situation in her life was shaping up. Later on, after watching this for some time, someone finally asked her what in the world she was doing?
"Well, " she muttered, "it looks like my retirement date is 2032! That can’t be right!"
Then everybody got in on the mathematics of it all; yes, 2032 was right! I nearly had an apocalyptic fit! In 2032 I would be, if I live, eighty-four years’ old! I had to get my nose involved then! I told her she would be probably working when Haleys’ Comet made its’ next run, she would be wearing orthopedic shoes and knitting sweaters for her grandchildren while working night shifts.
We had quite a merry old time teasing ‘Miss 2032' as she came to be known.
At that point I started plotting my escape, Joy had a dream about getting her pink slip telling her she was ‘laid off’, a dream that came in the form of finding her locker full of pink slippers, and Karen started searching through flyers, collecting coupons, and planning all sorts of innovative ways to save her pennies.
That is what pension readouts do to nurses!
Never mind Karen. It’s 2005 now, only twenty-seven years to go! You’ll have a good anchor by then!
You’ll be fine!
Bonnie Jarvis-Lowe
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