When Bob Opsahl signed off as the main Anchor at WFTV in Orlando after almost 40 years, he walked away headed to a life of retirement and relaxing.

But just a couple of weeks after signing off, he found out just how much he missed chasing the big story.

Opsahl remembers listening to a radio station in June of 2016, just a couple weeks after he signed off.

That’s when Opsahl became acutely aware that he was now a consumer of local news instead of a deliverer of it. And the news was bad. Horrific. A mass shooting had erupted at the local nightclub Pulse. Dozens were reported dead. Opsahl felt a sudden odd sensation of being out of place. Perhaps the biggest news story to ever hit Orlando was unfolding by the second and he was still in bed. He turned on his TV and imagined himself speaking from it instead of sitting silently in front of it. Heads were talking, but his wasn’t one of them.

“It was so strange,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘I should go to the studio and help out.’ But then I remembered that they had [anchor] Greg Warmoth, and he’s so good at breaking news. I also knew I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes in any way. So I sat there, watching TV, feeling so disoriented.”

Then last September, Opsahl watched as Hurricane Irma blew through Central Florida, bending the trees and blowing debris outside his home, and it struck him that this was the first time he had ever seen the actual wrath of a hurricane instead of reporting on it from inside an insulated newsroom.

Such is Opsahl’s adjustment to retirement.

“I really miss the people I worked with, people like [co-anchor] Martie Salt and Greg Warmoth, interesting, smart people who are stimulating to be around. I miss copy editing, taking a news event and delivering it with an economy of words on live TV, especially when you’re covering breaking news and you get that adrenaline rush. I miss having to think fast, having to ad lib during those live moments. It’s hard to duplicate all of that in retirement—the people you worked with and the environment you were in. It’s a big hole in my life.”

He still dreams about TV news. But those dreams are nightmares, often the same nightmares he used to have when he sat in the anchor’s chair. In those nightmares, three scenarios keep reoccurring: 1) he’s at a remote location as a reporter and can’t get back to the station in time, 2) the teleprompter isn’t working and someone gives him handwritten notes that he can’t read, 3) he realizes just as he’s going on air that he’s not wearing a shirt.

“The panic I feel is horrible and it really is a nightmare,” he says.

Yes gang, life after TV news can be an adjustment. Even after doing it for almost 40 years.

H/T Orlando Magazine