In what came as a shock to the local community, 83-year-old Cincnnati, OH resident Nadine Oliver announced her retirement this past weekend after 62 beautiful, fulfilling years spent trying and failing to find a job.
“As long as I’ve known Nadine, she’s been looking for a job,” local grocery store owner Andy Vaughn told reporters. “I don’t know how the community is going to bounce back from her no longer hanging around coffee shops, applying to jobs on her laptop.”
Then, in a clear attempt to get ahead of questions regarding why he, himself, never hired Nadine, Andy added, “It’s unfortunate that literally all of the positions at my grocery store require a minimum of eight years of experience.”
“Nadine will certainly be missed,” said Beatrice Alderson, fellow Cincinnati resident and one of Nadine’s longtime LinkedIn connections. “She was always posting on LinkedIn. Like, almost constantly. It was nice to know that while I wasn’t doing great in my career, someone out there was doing way, way worse.”
Nadine told reporters that, over the course of the 62 years she spent applying to jobs, reaching out to recruiters, and working with headhunters, she only heard back from six companies total, only two of which actually resulted in an interview.
“I’ll remember those interviews for as long as I live,” she said. “They were the best cumulative eight minutes of my entire life. I never did hear back from those companies after my interviews. I know it’s silly, but a small part of me is still holding out hope that they’ll reach out to me and tell me I got the job…”
In spite of her grandiose dreams, Nadine says that when it comes to her actual retirement plans, she intends to take the same approach that she did when job hunting for all those years: simply take it day by day.
“Having a bunch more free time will be nice,” Nadine said. Then, apparently getting lost in thought, added: “I probably applied for over 800,000 jobs. Are those positions even real? Did those so-called ‘openings’ ever really exist? These are the questions that keep me up at night.”
Regardless of her anxieties, Nadine says she’s hoping to make peace with her career trajectory and be grateful for the things it did bring her. Unfortunately, her career didn’t do much in the “bringing things” department, so for now she’s just looking forward to using all her newfound free time to smoke weed and watch movies.
