Why Not a 50 Over 50?? (pt. 1)

Reentering the Job Market at 50 plus...

So after I took off 9 years from my career to be the 24/7 live-in caregiver to my Pop after he suffered a massive stroke at the age of 80 which left him paralyzed on his right side I polished up my resume and paddled back out into the deep water, at the age of 50, sat on my vintage long board and waited on a big one to come ripping down the coast for me to hop on and ride back into the shore of retirement about ten to fifteen years further down the line, mix up a highball and sit on my front porch swing in rural Big Bear, Taos or Tahoe and write my memoirs. Easier said than done I've come to realize over the past 5 years and over 1800 resumes sent out. Having always lived my life immune to regrets up until this juncture I remained optimistic that a big wave would come along for me to jump onto at a six figure c-level position and I'd crank out a few years of ripping the waves, once again the Big Kahuna hotdogger of my early to mid career...invincible...Teflon smooth...tight and right...top of the leader board or a respectable 2nd or 3rd but always on the podium.

Well, as most of my contemporaries can attest to something changed during the nine years I took off to hang with my Pop ala "Tuesdays With Morrie" style. Long boards had been replaced by short fiberglass boards and what used to take 25+ years to accomplish was being done by young bucks with one or multiple exits before the age of 30. I don't recall ever getting the memo about this during my hiatis. Could someone in the mail room check to see if mine was returned? So after a few years of sending out resumes and job applications to over 1,800 job listings here on LinkedIn with only one (countem one!) getting as far as a personal interview I've come to a few conclusions about the current state of my career. I've also added one major regret to my life which up until now hasn't posed any real detriment to my career which I'll elaborate one further down a bit.

The first thing that hit me upside my head as hard as a spruce long board popping back up from down under a killer wave was that I somewhere in there became "old"....not to me mind you, but to everyone else out there. I guess I felt a little bit of this as I rounded the corner at the age of 40 but my momentum was blown off the course shortly afterward when my Pop had his stroke and I left the professional world as a top real estate litigation expert witness in LA billing out at $400/hr, 3 hr minimum, paid in advance for one of crushing pills up into his Maypo and memorizing what time and channel the Mash reruns were and listening to his stories of crashing 1937 Indians and driving P-51 Mustangs in WWII.

To be continued....