Some Days Working Sucks!

Yesterday morning, a new cache dropped a few miles from home. I wouldn’t exactly call it within the mile-and-a-half-to-two-mile radius that I consider my backyard, but it was at a location that I pass fairly often on the way home from work. Cool, I thought. I’ll swing by before work, snag an FTF, and then victory for me or some kind of crap like that. However, a meeting got moved from late morning to early morning. I wasn’t going to make it on time, so I pulled out my laptop and took the meeting from home. It was important and ran long (there was a reason it got moved up), but I was free to leave once that fire got put out.

I drove to the appointed lamppost in the appointed parking lot but was neither surprised nor disheartened to find another signature on the log, made by a local FTF hound who is retired and usually swings through the area grabbing FTFs relatively early in the morning. He didn’t get to this one until later. I comically considered casting off my job for costing me an FTF, but since it keeps me in Cheetos and road trips, what the heck—I’ll keep it. Why not?

This all does lay bare an earnest truth: I don’t want to work. That’s nothing special. Outside of those most passionate about their work, that’s most people. I’m not in love with my job, but it’s not like I dig ditches. So if I must work, I’m happy to wrangle spreadsheets all day. I’m looking forward to the day when I can just take off and drive for the heck of it. Realistically, that’s not going to happen. I’m hardly made of money, so retirement probably won’t even be by choice. But one day I hope to have the time to drive off to some part of the country and spend a couple of weeks driving around the counties there. I want to spend days writing about all the counties I’ve been to, so many in a row that I can take off to more counties while the new counties are still publishing daily. I want to go to Alaska once because I can spend a month up there, flying and ferrying between boroughs. I’d love to do all of Ohio or Michigan in one trip. But more than anything, I miss the wind in my hair and the road beneath my feet. And if that means I have to write formulas to compare one column to another to afford it, I guess that’s just what I’ll have to do. But driving sure beats spreadsheets any day.