Do you ( or did you ) enjoy your job?
By and large I count myself lucky that for the most part I do, and indeed always have. It's a fast paced environment where no two days are the same and mostly it's quite good fun. This is of course not always the case, and some days can be majorly worrying or depressing but no one gets killed usually so all that has to be held in context!
I do though seem to feel that quite a lot of people hate their occupations and continue to do them only because they need the money and that they haven't yet thought of a better idea.
And you?
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My job is a means to an end. It provides the cash I need in order to enjoy my non working time. If I didn't have to, I wouldn't work.
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I"m lucky I work through choice. Don't get me wrong the money is useful. I enjoy the social side of it and the feeling of "doing something" I'm down to 22.5 hours now which suits me. Full time has been on offer for a while, not interested.
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Oh to be fair, I'd not work if I didn't have to, but I do mostly enjoy it. The trouble is, the things I'd want to do if I didn't work would cost too much if I didn't have the income but because I work I don't have the time to do them. Suppose that applies to a lot of people.
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I like mine because I'm out and about all day and I am solely responsible for where I go and how I go about it. Tomorrow I meet my Regional Manager for the fifth time in the twelve years I have worked for her and that's only because we are at a former colleagues funeral. All communication if by email and phone.
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I'm like Humph: do it because I have to but enjoy it more than not. I've been here eight years, doing three different but related jobs, so I feel I'm nicely integrated into the organization and people know who I am. What I especially like is that those people are all over the world - we're wide but very thin - so I've had the privilege of close-up views of a lot of places and cultures I'd not have got any other way. Hard to be an isolationist when you're part of a community like this!
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I could not agree with you more.
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For 25 years, I loved my job and the company I worked for. For 8 years, both job and same company were ok, for 5 years the work was crap, and the same company utterly hateful. For the last 5 years the company and work I dont work for is fantastic.
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>For 25 years, I loved my job and the company I worked for.
Got an email last week from someone still there saying RA was underway. Reported a few days later in The Reg that 1,350 are to go in UK.
www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/22/ibm_cuts_185_jobs_global_technology_services_layoffs/
Glad I'm out.
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>> >For 25 years, I loved my job and the company I worked for.
>>
>> Got an email last week from someone still there saying RA was underway. Reported a
>> few days later in The Reg that 1,350 are to go in UK.
>>
>> www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/22/ibm_cuts_185_jobs_global_technology_services_layoffs/
>>
>> Glad I'm out.
What other company calls redundancies "resource actions" Its run by idiots, lying clueless idiots.
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>> >> >For 25 years, I loved my job and the company I worked for.
>> >>
> Glad I'm out.
>>
>> What other company calls redundancies "resource actions" Its run by idiots, lying clueless idiots.
>>
Only reason I am still there is enjoying the job I am doing and the people I am doing it with, it will not be much longer before I call it a day
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I enjoy my job. I work with books.
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When I was in the mobile car tuning game for 14 years, it was more of a hobby than work really.
I was self-employed, the money was good too. When I got fed up with London in '87, I moved down to St Leonards on Sea and started up again.
Sold the lot, biz and house in '92 and fled to Tenerife for a few years, came back to blighty, bought a place high up on Bodmin Moor (Warleggan) and been in Cornwall ever since.
Still think about moving on, maybe back to the Canaries/Spain/Cyprus, mainly for the climate as the winters in this country get on my thrupney bits.
:}
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Why don't you just rent somewhere for a couple of months each winter Dog? I'm off to Lanzarote tomorrow for a couple of weeks but nest year I am seriously considering looking for somewhere to spend January and February in the sun.
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Perro, I'm still renting in Cala de Finestrat with a few friends... Owners Direct ref 8036295. Not my sort of place but great to escape the UK winter for 6 weeks. Stayed for a week with friends up the coast in Moraira, which I preferred, and spent a few days in Valencia. Some stunning coastal walking... About 12 /14 miles to Albir & Altea, and in the other direction to Villajoyosa. Lovely villages inland and some proper mountain walking. No rain, temps maxing high 60s but feels warmer, although some days down to high 50s.
I won't return to this specific area, and would prefer 2 x 3 weeks in future should the opportunity arise. Maybe Moraira ( Portet) next time and LC.
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>>I'm still renting in Cala de Finestrat with a few friends...
I've watched every episode of Bargain-loving Brits in the sun on channel 5. Not my sort of program really, but it was highly entertaining and, what a life!
Just 2 days out of the last 62 have been dry days here in Sunni Cornwall. Worse in Wales and the further North one goes of course. I said years ago they should have moved the British isles further South orf the coast of the Spanish Sahara, but would they listen, would they f***.
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>> Why don't you just rent somewhere for a couple of months each winter Dog?
Yep, we could do that CG. 3 months sounds better though - it should be available on the NHS IMO.
Have a nice one in Lanzarote - I'll be thinking of you tomorrow night when I sitting in front of my log burner ;)
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I was offered a few places to read Geography ( after the RN turned me down on the spurious grounds that my eyesight was not good enough for flying. Pah)
Decided to go into the family business supplying schools & libraries and ended up running it at a young age when my Father died suddenly. With reduced Govt funding I saw the writing on the wall and left after ten years to go into retail...myself and the ex ex ended up with several small stores and loved every minute. 6 day weeks, Book keeping Sunday am, silly hours but very few ' bad days' over a 15 year period. Staff thieving was the only part that got me down. Ill health forced a period of rehab and had to sell up. Then 6 months cheese making, two years selling outdoor gear ( rotten pay but as much kit at cost price as I shall ever need) then three years in a small DIY store. I've been soooooo lucky. I still regularly dream about some of the jobs, and they are good dreams!
Never made a fortune, enough for a pleasant lifestyle... Not many people can say they always looked forward to working Saturdays, Bank holidays and Christmas Eve. I can honestly say I did.
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Not many people can say they
>> always looked forward to working Saturdays, Bank holidays and Christmas Eve. I can honestly say
>> I did.
>>
I am surprised to see you say that, with all your travelling I had you down as a work to live type of chap with work being there to fund your holidays.
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Actually sooty if I had not experienced the unfortunate episode with my body malfunctioning I would still be at it. Doctors orders and an in depth study of a hospital ceiling changed things.
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>> Doctors orders and an in depth study of a hospital
>> ceiling changed things.
Green thumb didn't sem right response but I can absolutely empathise with that reaction. Not quite been there myself but Mrs B and my Father both did in their own place and time.
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Fair enough, at least you're up and running now.
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Wish I could run. Or even jog. Sooner I get a new hip the better, although that pales into insignificance with the earlier malfunction. Gotta be grateful ( very) for small mercies.
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Sorry just a turn of phrase.
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>> I was offered a few places to read Geography ( after the RN turned me
>> down on the spurious grounds that my eyesight was not good enough for flying.
I was turned down by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary because my eyesight fell below the required standards.
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>> I was turned down by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary because my eyesight fell below the
>> required standards.
>>
Not able to see the golden rivet?
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Blimey, there does seem to be a fair few navy rejects in here.
31 years in the police...mostly loved it. The only bit that wasn't really me was office type work, but even when doing that, it was inter mingled with the shift stuff.
Been driving a van for 3.5 years...nothing not to like really. Part-time, mon - thurs.. and.. it's in South Devon. Pay is crap, but it tops things up and I feel i'm 'doing something'.
Ran my own business selling cars for 3 years and worked it around the van job, with the intention of binning the van job when (if) it picked up. Too much hassle for not enough return, was the result of that, so I pulled the plug, as I couldn't see it changing enough to make it worth my while.
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Always money first.Three children to care for we both worked hard wife and me to give them a good start in live.
I have done many jobs,longest was BP for 27 years.
The job I liked most was working for Piet Smit towage.
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Like most women I always had to juggle a job with looking after a home, dependent parent and a child for the first 16 years of my working life but I needed to work full time, anything less wasn't an option.
This led to a variety of jobs all of which I enjoyed but never loved.
Then when the parent died and my son was 14 I finally felt I could do something I really wanted to do, where I could be free and unfettered, where I could work alone and stand or fail by my own efforts.
I became a lorry driver and loved every single minute of the next 30 years. I always drove out of the yard at the start of the week with a huge smile on my face, not knowing where I would sleep that night or where the week would take me, other than my bed and 'home' were behind my seat.
I found doing a job you love is never work, it's a pleasure.
Pat
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Great isn't it when you actually look forward to going to work, and it pays the mortgage, and you earn sufficient for 3 x 1 weeks holiday a year. In 43 years I only had two dark times...when a manager was stealing large amounts of stock and I couldn't prove anything, so with specialist advice had to make the position 'redundant' at considerable expense, and when I sold a profitable shop to a lifelong friend who ran it into the ground within 12 months. Bought it back at half the original sale price, built it back up and sold it again but lost a good friend in the process. All part of life s'pose. Makes it more interesting.
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Reminds me of the chap I sold my car tuning business to - brilliant engineer (ex RAF) but could he tune a car, could he eck.
He didn't have the rapport with customers like I did either. Nice chap though - he drove me back from Eastbourne to Bexhill in the Westfield he'd built - an unforgettable experience that was!!
Last edited by: Dog on Fri 26 Feb 16 at 07:22
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>> >> I was turned down by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary because my eyesight fell below
>> the
>> >> required standards.
>> >>
>>
>> Not able to see yhe golden rivet?
See that bouy to port?
No?
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...or, watch out for that bus!! Oh...
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>> >> I was offered a few places to read Geography ( after the RN turned
>> me
>> >> down on the spurious grounds that my eyesight was not good enough for flying.
>>
>>
>> I was turned down by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary because my eyesight fell below the
>> required standards.
>>
I passed the Royal Navy medical as it was the same one for the Royal Marines. There was much attention paid to colour perception - no one wants a boat driver mixing up port & starboard lights!
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>> Then 6 months cheese
>> making
You'll be all right in the afterlife then. Blessed are the Cheese Makers.
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And I've been called worse than Biggus Dickus on more than one occasion...
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Supplementary question, for those who work only for the money and feel no real affinity with ( or even hate ) their occupations.
Are you really going to keep on doing that day in, week in, month in, year in year out until you don't have to or can't?
Heck of a chunk of waking life to be unhappy.
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I should have been born rich! I only ever worked because I had to.
WORK is a four letter word. :-)
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I don't wish to sound at all deprecating Roger, but you have my sympathy. s'funny, but when I was working silly hours up until a few years ago, I enjoyed the stress, the camaraderie with my staff, the interaction with customers & suppliers. The buying, the selling, the experimenting with new products, the merchandising....even the Sunday morning book keeping and getting the trial balance correct at the first attempt.
In truth, I was probably happier overall than I am now. Quite an admission!
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To state the bleeding obvious, the old adage about identifying something you like doing or are interested in and finding a way of making a living from it seems to be the key to contentment.
Not necessarily the route to wealth and security of course. I have neither ( or not much anyway ) of those but I don't mind really. Most days are quite pleasing in other ways.
Never been one to much hang onto the notion of things being likely to improve in the future, all of us may only have today so surely it's best to try to enjoy it and if we're not, to do something about that?
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I've been director of a small not for profit company for 20 years. I'm in the process of training successors to take over, and have been reducing my working week to part time gradually over the last three or four years.
I retire from any paid work after April, but will continue as a director for as long as I can contribute something. Planning and implementing succesion has been a challenging, sometimes stressful, but rewarding exercise.
I'm responsible for 10 people's jobs, so have never had the option of just giving up. Anyway, it's still great fun.
Last edited by: Cliff Pope on Fri 26 Feb 16 at 10:22
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A TV documentary about working on the British Leyland production line featured one worker, who'd been there for the whole of his working life. When pressed on what a drudge it must have been, his sad, but obviously heart-felt, reply was "Ah, but at least I had the war to take me away from it."
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>> Supplementary question, for those who work only for the money and feel no real affinity
>> with ( or even hate ) their occupations.
>>
>> Are you really going to keep on doing that day in, week in, month in,
>> year in year out until you don't have to or can't?
>>
>> Heck of a chunk of waking life to be unhappy.
>>
People i know do it because they have a hobby to keep paying for. Usually an expensive one. The job purely pays for the weekend. Not sure how common it is though?
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I think that's probably right Sooty. I knew a guy once who worked in a factory on the production line. Mind numbingly boring job but he saved as much as he could each year and arranged to take all his holidays in one block so that he could pursue his passion for volunteering as a crew member on a tall ship.
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i been working in the nhs for 8 years now so currently enjoy the job, been doing some overtime recently as i bought some expensive gear, a nikon 810 camera and a nikon 85mm 1,4 lens, this month i ordered a teac nt503 a network dac wihch i connnected to my hifi.
The moneys good as i work nights sat sun time and half, sat and double time sun, its a bit of both i work in a fantastic team, and enjoy the rewards my job gives me
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Another friend, who trained as as art teacher and didn't enjoy that, has spent the past 30 years sign writing and otherwise painting graphics onto narrow boats. Poor as a church mouse but he's happier than some I know. Lives on a boat himself with his scatty wife and a couple of Lurchers. Nice people.
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I knew a junior executive officer in a local council who devoted his entire pay to keeping a racehorse.
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In general I enjoy my job but occasionally some part of it becomes boring, politics and frustrating. But I guess that is true with most of professions anyway.
I have realized that the place where I spent ~10 hours every week day, it has to offer something I like (other than money) - otherwise hanging around is too difficult.
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I love my job due to the feeling of job satisfaction I get from it. I am in the privileged position that I see on a daily basis our "shareholders" and why we work so hard.
The job itself has lots of challenges due to the environment but after having been in Supermarket retailing for over 10 years and being treated like dirt, you don't mind doing 12 hour days where you see the benefits to others.
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>> Do you ( or did you ) enjoy your job?
Yep - been writing embedded software for over 25 years now, after a misspent youth training on home micros. No management responsibility, and have spent the last 10 years working 60% of the time in picturesque Bath with a great bunch of people in a nice environment being paid too much (compared to sister, who is a teacher, and wife who has worked for the NHS amongst other things). And as you know, as of last year I've even got a company car. Very lucky.
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Just out of interest what is writing embedded software Focusless?
Like Consultants what do these jobs mean maybe a silly question.I remember one consultant came to our place of work.When he was finished a lot of jobs where gone.Also a very unpleasant chap to talk to.
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Company I was at had McKinsey in. Predictable outcome. We called them the 'insultants'.
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Bad consulting projects annoy me a lot. Mind you, its often as much hidden management agendas as it is crap consulting. Typically it takes the management and the consultants to cooperate to make it a complete dogs dinner.
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Cynically, I suspect that many instances of calling in the insultants are driven by a management predetermination to cut jobs but to be seen to be doing so on the advice of a supposedly impartial third party.
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In my experience Consultants are always aware of what the result of their engagement is expected to be.
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...which, in my experience, is to keep themselves in chargeable work for as long as possible, whilst introducing as many of their (also chargeable) colleagues into the same assignment (with, I have to say, a few honourable exceptions, but only a few). ;-)
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>is to keep themselves in chargeable work for as long as possible, whilst introducing as many of their (also chargeable) colleagues into the same assignment
Absolutely. They have specific targets for both those measured activities.
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>> >is to keep themselves in chargeable work for as long as possible, whilst introducing as
>> many of their (also chargeable) colleagues into the same assignment
>>
and, the first one anyway, you cannot do while producing nothing of value to the client
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>> and, the first one anyway, you cannot do while producing nothing of value to the client
>>
....you'd like to think so , wouldn't you, but there has been more than one occasion (in different organisations) where, on taking on 'troubleshooting' roles for failing projects that I've found consultants well dug in and producing little or anything of worth (and indeed, it being obvious to the people at the coal-face, if not the responsible management).
Their removal and transfer of responsibility to in-house individuals has been the source of a number of (my) turn-round successes.
As I've said above, I've worked with some good consultants, but many of them weren't. (and, of course, at least half of any issues should be laid at the assignment manager's door).
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Regretfully I'd have to agree with tyred on this one.
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...you regret that you have to agree.....
...or more specifically, you regret that you have to agree with me?
;-)
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I am not sure why I would have an issue agreeing with you. Have I forgotten something?
But I meant I regret that your statement about consultant behaviour is correct, and that there are so many examples of it.
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>>Have I forgotten something?
>>
>>
...not at all; I thought your statement was a splendid example of the type of ambiguity I've seen in consultant's reports. ;-)
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The best way is to ensure that the Engagement Manager / Project Manager and the Consultants come from different consultancies.
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And then when the whole sorry masquerade is over and the most expensive ( aka most experienced and most useful ) people have been made redundant, the company then has to hire them back on short term consultancy ( aka even more expensive ) rates because the cheaper ( aka less expensive and less useful ) people are royally lashing everything up due to being less able and now hopelessly overworked.
The result is that that when the cost of the insultants, the costs of the redundancies, the costs of the re-hired help and the costs of the inevitable downturn in business are taken into account the business is now a complete financial basket case rather than one which only needed a bit of tweaking in the first place and which could have achieved that by involving and challenging its own existing managers to find the solutions and improvements at no cost, rather than keeping them in the dark and sending in a bunch of ill informed but intelligent sounding hoorays with their own profit agenda.
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In which case Runfer, I'd line up the person(s) who wrote the consulting brief, who signed the engagement description, who reviewed deliverables and the steering committee against the wall and save my company a bunch of money.
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You may or may not be surprised to learn that is exactly what happened in due course. Metaphorically speaking of course.
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>>You may or may not be surprised to learn that is exactly what happened in due course.
Good, but unusual.
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Tell you all about it one day if you like. Not on a public forum though !
;-)
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I look forward to it, I'm always interested in how companies sort themselves out. There's always something to learn.
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>> Just out of interest what is writing embedded software Focusless?
Sorry - software that runs on (and is embedded in) 'devices' as opposed to computers, eg. I've written software for military radios, mobile phones, femtocells (Vodafone SureSignal).
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Love or Money? - Alastairw
