Reached 60? It's time to play I Spy

As one door shuts, another opens. Such is the good news for baby boomers employers would love to get rid of.
It's true that they expect to be paid realistically, and also true that they can't live on air like young people on 90-day trials paid the minimum wage are expected to do. They have hearing aids, Viagra, walking sticks, prescription lenses, astronomical dental bills and prosthetic limbs to pay for, as well as the occasional hundred grams of mince and half a cabbage that they splash out on.
They'll be watching with interest the case of the Air New Zealand pilots, forced to retire at 60, scheduled for the Employment Court later this year. Paul Roth, a University of Otago employment law specialist, says employers in general are struggling with ways to get older employees to retire without discriminating against them. "We have a lot of people in the workforce in their late 60s or 70s, and they are hanging on to their jobs," he laments. And yet an obvious solution stares us in the face.
Enter Pakistan trainee and former Security Intelligence Service agent Charles Wardle, who revealed last weekend that he'd spied for this country for $25 an hour, a pay rate that sends a depressing message to the world on the state of our spy service, but is still better than the pension.
Finance Minister Bill English may claim our low pay rates are an advantage internationally, but this rate is a little embarrassing, especially as Wardle claims he was considered to be a highly paid agent.
And yet - let's be creative here - hasn't this opened up a line of work for the very people employers would like to be shot of? Who better to do snooping, peering and prying work than people of an age when they naturally become curtain twitchers, waging war on neighbourhood dogs, and writing letters of complaint about their posties? Deprived of the glory of war that their fathers enjoyed, this would be a chance for baby boomers to serve their country, and possibly earn medals for it, too.
Wardle, 28, and plainly much too young, revealed that he had an informal arrangement with the SIS, that what he earned was tax-free, and that he made $450 a week before he gave up.
And what enviable work it was. All he had to do was hang around mosques searching for jihadists, and offering jihadist material to Muslims. He was given no training, and his handlers were vague about what exactly they wanted from him.
"The oversight was minimal," he declared. In short, it was the ideal job, especially for someone with spare time on their hands and a mosque within a few bus stops of home.
As an illustration of his earlier commitment to the job, Wardle said he'd even submitted to circumcision. Just who would be inspecting him and why was not made clear, but I can assure the SIS that baby boomers were routinely circumcised, so they'd incur no further cost. I mention this because towards the end of his employment the SIS was cutting back on Wardle's expenses. I expect he overdid it on the milkshakes.
More than a fifth of our workforce is over the age of 60, nearly 800,000 men and women. It would be sensible for the SIS to recruit the lot, secure in the knowledge that no rubbish bin would go unexamined, that Muslims would be trailed night and day to the corner dairy and back, and that the usual all-round radicals would have their movements carefully jotted down. Who would suspect little old men and women? Nobody notices them.
There is room, while we're at it, to hire older people to teach professional development courses for the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, which has been criticised for running irrelevant courses like "How to Sleep" - now mysteriously withdrawn.
Older people are experienced in this difficult art, and would happily tutor tradesmen on advanced performances. I'm thinking of the post-prandial nap and the television snore.