During the strike, we were all equals--those freshly out of college in Daily Show jackets and those of us with orthotics fitted into our walking shoes who had to contend with notes from the network censoring a story as tame as a young girl walking into her parents' bedroom while they were making love. "Totally unacceptable" was their response to the first half-hour script I'd sold.

The end of picketing was like a second retirement. There's no official moment to commemorate the ending of your career, so as my final mentoring gesture to younger comedy writers, I've come up with formulas to help signal when it's over:

1) The laughs you worked to create are memorialized as lines on your face. Female comedy writers, take heart, they now have restalyne to minimize them (but the WGA Health Plan doesn't cover cosmetic procedures, even if we've incurred the lines on the job).

2) Let X equal the number of meetings in a typical month and let Y equal miles driven to meetings. Multiply X times Y and divide by Z (the number of deals made). When you detect a quick and sudden change, retire.

3) If that's too much math, let X equal the number of times you call your agent while Y equals the calls returned. When X and Y have nothing to do with each other, swing by the Motion Picture Retirement Home.