By then he had been shunted to a backwater, assigned menial tasks and was being treated with less than great respect by his colleagues.

He was still taking home a regular pay packet and sometimes shared a drink after work but he just wasn’t, well, cool.

Some just hoped he’d go away, but those who bothered to find out knew that this old bloke had more professional runs on the boards than most of them put together.

He was an exceptional man, making headlines in the 1960s for an act of incredible bravery, and an out-of-the-ordinary journalist who had covered some of the biggest stories of his time. He had outmoded social opinions, an abrasive manner and was past his best but it was sad to see him marginalised, something I increasingly pondered as the years devoured my own youth.

I suspect most of us thought our bosses were doing the old bloke a favour by keeping him on, but, with the wisdom of hindsight and a changing workplace, I have to wonder whether the joke wasn’t on us.

Mark Behringer, 56, is the 6000th employee for Masters, who appreciate the experience of more than 600 workers over the age of 55.

If so, it was an expensive joke with Age Discrimination Commissioner Susan Ryan telling us a national reluctance to hire older workers is costing us billions a year.

CAREER HALT: Age discrimination costs billions

DRIVEN: Older job seeker resorted to car signage to find a job

Research for the Human Rights Commission showed that a 3 per cent increase in workforce participation for those over 55 would contribute an extra $33 billion to our GDP.

It makes the image of old-timers put out to pasture and sitting in the sun a pretty expensive prospect.

Ryan announced a new study into age discrimination but jumped the gun by venturing that she thought its findings would be “quite frightening”.

When it comes to discrimination, we could well look sideways at the desk next door as well as upwards towards our bosses.

But the immediately scary thing was that Ryan suggested people approaching 50 get a “career check-up” to map out at least the next decade of their working life.

(While they have the map out, I would suggest the 50-year-olds make sure they are still sitting on the speed limit and not holding up traffic.)

However, in a more innocent workplace, 50 was our prime income time, a point at which our jobs were reasonably secure and, if we wanted, we could have gone into cruise control for the run towards 65.

Now, with the retirement age being eased towards 70 and 50 the new career crisis point, workers are looking down the barrel of 20 years of uncertainty.

It doesn’t seem much of a reward for 30 or more years of toil nor a worthwhile dividend from a century or more of economic progress, and for kids who are told ad nauseam that they will be doing the heavy lifting in the not-too-distant future it must be infuriating.

We have been talking about an ageing population for decades but nobody seems to be doing much about it except to penalise those born in the wrong year.

We know the problem but aren’t prepared to grasp the solution that is lying there in front of us.

If my correspondence counts for anything, there are plenty of eager and qualified older people crying out for work at a time when we are supposed to be suffering some kind of skills crisis.

The Federal Government is offering businesses up to $10,000 if they employ and keep a worker over the age of 50.

It is a scheme worth trying, but I wonder if subsidies accidentally reinforce the notion older people are worth nothing more than a charitable handout.

The truth is if we and our bosses thought out of the square, older workers could be doing us a favour – a $33 billion favour.