How I came to be retired at 59

It was 2012. I had just signed up for my 9th stint at Intel, where software goes to die. The recruiter will remain nameless, because all of them suck.

It was supposedly a 12-week project doing something I had never done before, as usual. When you’re a contractor you take what’s offered.

Interviewed with the project lead, big dude, 6’4” about 280. We came to an agreement and I started the next Monday.

Now he felt it was really important that the project got finished in the 12-week window, or else ‘Intel will lose millions’. Whatever. They never release software at Intel, as the software division is just a bag on the side of the chip division.

The project was actually interesting for once — allowing people to directly send pictures to other people in the range of their WIFI without using an external network. The official name was Multicast DNS (Domain Name Server).

Multicast was the part where the phone would send out a generalized ‘are you there?’ to any other phones in the room. The DNS was network infrastructure that I won’t get into (though it was actually pretty interesting).

We got together the first week and he re-emphasized how vital this project was to Intel’s bottom line and meeting the schedule was absolutely crucial. Jeez, I get it — you want your year-end bonus and you’re willing to burn contractors to do it. Once again, whatever.

He introduces me to the 20 other software dweebs writing apps that will run on the code I’ll be writing. They’re all in a big pit of cubes facing into a common area because ‘synergy’. Two ‘rah, rah, go team’ meetings the first week. They’re really leaning into the tech bro shine-ons that you seldom see at Intel because all the software folks know for a fact they are considered the slow cousins there.

So, we go over the list of known unknowns — can we co-exist with the Apple version of this, do we need to use Unicode, etc.

Then on Thursday of the first week he announces he’s taking off Week 2 for a trip to Africa. Gone for two weeks. Say what?

I ask him how this squares with his self-proclaimed timeline and he says it was scheduled last year and he cannot miss this church trip. Whatever.

While he’s gone, I find the answers to the unknowns and begin to write the receiver side of the software in C (a programming language).

Before I know it, the receiver code is up and running and I’m talking to the public printers on that floor (there were 7 of them). Had to learn how to write Unicode, which is a universal encoding scheme that allows for all different languages. It was a pain, but I have that in my toolset now, which is nice.

One day in week 3 the QA (Quality Assurance) dude comes over and asks if I can give him a heads-up on what I’m doing. I tell him we can get together Week 4, since he’s the QA guy who will become my own personal hemorrhoid at the end of the project.

Turns out, I’m the only person on this 21-person project who will even talk to him at all. When he told me this, I thought we had a conspirator thing going. Oh well.

So week 4, tall and stupid returns and I update him on the great progress I had made. The server/sending side would probably take just another week. We’d be done by week 6 at the latest, well ahead of schedule.

Thought he’d be thrilled but no, he shits all over my news — says he was supposed to be the lead while we do ‘pair programming’ and that the language I picked was totally wrong — it had to be C++.

WTF? Translating between C and C++ would have taken maybe a day. He was acting like I had completely screwed the timeline. By the time he finished his little rant every head in the pit was watching me getting dressed down like an intern. I was fuming.

I’d been writing software for 35 years by this point — my wallet was older than this asshole talking down to me like I’m slow and stupid. NOTHING he was complaining about had ever been discussed between us, which he, of course, denied.

I take off at noon and go home to brood. I had a meeting at 8am the next day with the QA dweeb.

I show up nice and early and the FIRST thing out of his mouth was ‘dude, that was brutal’. ‘Yeah’ I said, ‘if he ever talks to me like that again I’m gonna kick his ass’. This is in keeping with my two years of construction and 20 years being nicknamed ‘Storm Trooper’.

We get down to talking about the project and I give him a demo wherein my code talked to and explored a printer across the room. He was appropriately impressed.

I get back to my cube and nobody would even look at me. I told the group I could demo the code and no one took me up on it. Tall and stupid took off at high speed when he saw me.

Turns out the QA asshole came out of that meeting and IMMEDIATELY dropped a dime on me to tall and stupid, who left and went to lodge a complaint to Security. He had six inches and 60 pounds on me, and all he could think of doing was going to whine to Security. What an absolute fucking pussy.

Seeing the way this working out, I left at 9:30 and went home. Got a call at noon asking me to come back in.

As expected, my badge had been de-activated. A little dweeb Security prick picked me up at the front desk and took me to a conference room.

He dialed up the recruiter and got him on the speaker phone.

“I’d like to ask you about the terroristic threat you made this morning”.

I just looked at him and said “I have nothing to say to you”. He then explained that refusal to discuss it would negatively impact my ability to ever work at Intel again. Like I fucking cared at that point. I despise Intel.

I repeated my line and just asked if I could get my stuff from my cube — radio/headphones/notebook. Got my stuff and left. Tall and stupid looked depressed, since I didn’t leave my functioning code anywhere he could find it. Fuck him.

THE NEXT DAY I get an email from a different recruiter with the EXACT SAME JOB OPENING that I’d responded to 4 weeks earlier. Just had to laugh.

And all of that led to:

Romney Campaign - Part 1

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August 16, 2025

In the summer of 2012, I retired from Intel and we decided to sell our house and travel the country.