When people start to reach retirement age, there are all sorts of different ways they might feel about nearing this milestone.
Because while many are no doubt counting down the time before they don’t have to work anymore, others can find that they weren’t as ready for this big step as they think. That can be for financial reasons, but it’s also possible to have a crisis of simply being unsure what you’re going to do with yourself once it happens.
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But as one man noticed at the major company he once worked for, there was an entirely different reason to sweat it when he was about to become eligible for retirement. And that was that he was in for the fight of his life if he had any hope of securing his pension.
Until about eight years ago, the man we’re about to hear about had been working at an unspecified Forbes 500 company since the 1970s.
As one of his children wrote on Reddit, he worked his way up to management from software engineering and is responsible for multiple patents that have saved the company millions of dollars.
Nonetheless, when his retirement was looming, he discovered that the company’s HR department started looking for any reason they could to get rid of him before he could collect his pension.
He also noticed that this was common for employees who reach the age of 60.
First, the HR representative tried to claim that he wasn’t clocking in and out at the right times.
As the Redditor said, “He knew that these were false accusations and asked HR to prove it.”
A week later, they admitted that they couldn’t, to which he replied that this was because he’s arrived to work on the corporate carpool bus for the last 15 years. He also mentioned that he had 16 witnesses that see him show up on time every day.
With that attempt to block his pension failed, HR came back a week later and said they were going to fire him for letting people into the building without using their security badges.
When he asked when he had done this, the representative played a video of him holding the door open for his best friend and coworker of 35 years.
It’s worth noting that this person uses a wheelchair after complications from type 2 diabetes led to the amputation of his foot.
But while this would seem like a shockingly poor excuse to fire someone, it turned out that the man was ready for it.
Before this meeting, he had taken the head of security out to lunch and acquired some footage of his own since he was obviously aware of what his company was trying to do to him.
So when he was confronted with the video of his friend, he had the perfect reply.
As he said, “That is very interesting. You are going to fire me for holding the door for my best friend of 35 years after his foot was amputated and he was in a wheelchair? Fine then I hope you fire the CEO and yourself as well!”
With that, he showed the HR representative footage of herself and the company’s CEO holding the door open for that very same employee in the same way he had.
Needless to say, he was able to stick around until he was eligible for his pension after that.
And as his child explained, he has started his own company since retiring and patented new inventions that desalinate seawater and improve solar energy systems.
After securing patents for his work in India, China, and the United States, he’s in the process of providing this tech to countries in need of clean water and power throughout the world.
h/t: Reddit | Sorkoth1
