What's your job and do you enjoy it? I'm sick of mine...

revsorg

RobDavies said:

I work in Air Traffic Control Training ... fairly stress free 

colourofsound

@mellowsun Yeah I've been considering that. I could actually work from home; I've been known to remote in to check on stuff when I've had holidays over busy periods.

The trouble is, I don't think they'd go for it. Universities (well, this one at least) are very culture-centric; really opposed to change. There's very little reason why i couldn't do my job in 4 or even 3 days a week; but I don't think they'd go for it. I have a feeling this is generally a problem in public sector industries.

I will find the right time and ask though...

colourofsound

@vasselmeyer That sounds perfect! Do they need anymore employees?

Ravenous

colourofsound said:

...It does have it's benefits though - I'm often out of the office by 4pm, the pay is pretty good and I have a good set of lads in the office.

Heh what are you complaining about? That sounds great.

Though I'm lucky in that my job (programming) frequently stretches me beyond my average abilities, so I can't complain about being bored. It's good people here too.

But for your situation the general conditions sound pretty good!

So I'd say get a demanding hobby instead.

colourofsound

@Ravenous It's everything in moderation though - yes, that is a good situation to be in but that makes up like 10% of my job. I do have to regularly check in with myself to make sure I'm not being a dick about it all, but at the end of the day what use is leaving at 4pm when you feel fucking depressed and listless most of the time? I feel tired at the end of the day because I haven't done anything useful; not because I've been busy and pro-active.

Budgie

I work as an artist and sell my work through a number of galleries around the country and work on the occasional commission. I also have agreements with a large art print company and John Lewis to sell reproductions of my work. Aside from this, I frame work for other people when I have time, I buy and sell antiques and occasionally design and build gardens for people (this used to be my main income, but it's become a much lesser part of my working life). I enjoy it a lot as it can be as varied as I want. I did the 9-5 thing in the past and absolutely hated it. I hated the thought of being in the shower at exactly the same time each day, the same traffic jam and the same workplace. It's not always as straightforward as a guaranteed salary though, but I can live with that.

the_jaffa

I'm qualified as a Structural Engineer but now work in a small but award-winning Bicycle shop in the Peak District. I'm mainly doing the workshop jobs, wheel-building etc but do some sales too (there's only three of us here so we all chip in on everything)

I've gone from feelings of dread through most of Sunday, every week, to mostly being pretty happy at work. I do four days a week and I get to play with expensive toys. My commute has gone from 30 minutes of sitting of traffic lights to 3x further but still only 30 minutes and driving out through the Peak District. Not bad at all.

Downsides are that the pay isn't great (although for this business it's actually pretty good), working Saturdays and it has definitely had a negative effect on my hobby to some extent.

Still, better than the engineering for me.

Hope you manage to come up with something more satisfying @colourofsound ;;

scrumhalf

I'm god.

There's no career progression and the hours are, well, all day every day.

VimFuego

self employed gardener.  work about 4 mornings and 1 afternoon a week currently (so about 16 hours a week). Love it, it's pretty much my idea of the best job in the world. Sure, I earn a fraction of what I did when I was in the corportate world (gave that up pretty much to the day 10 years ago) and sometimes work dries up (all my clients are elderly, and I've lost 2 in the last 18 months, so you do go through periods with not mch work, and the weather can put paid to work as well), but I'm outdoors in t he fresh air, the work is very varied, and all my clients are in walking distance of home.

Sometimes wonder what I will do when I'm too old to garden, need to look into adding more strings to my bow.

revsorg

scrumhalf said:

I'm god.

There's no career progression and the hours are, well, all day every day.

If you could just explain why you keep making the innocent suffer?   Oh, and cats - well done, you did a really good job there.

blobb

I used to fix sewage works.

Then I learnt how to design sewage works that don't need fixing, which I though would be a useful attribute. 

Turns out it's not. So I'm now sat in a cold site cabin, trying to fix sewage works. Apart from we haven't built this one yet, so it doesn't need fixing yet.

But it will need fixing, I'm pretty sure of that.

 

stimpsonslostson

scrumhalf said:

I'm god.

There's no career progression and the hours are, well, all day every day.

Or just an hour on Sundays.

thermionic

proggy said:

I'm a printer, I operate a Heidelberg press.

Sometimes I enjoy it and sometimes I don't.

I feel the same way about the Heisenberg press.

proggy

thermionic said:

proggy said:

I'm a printer, I operate a Heidelberg press.

Sometimes I enjoy it and sometimes I don't.

I feel the same way about the Heisenberg press.

I know. Don't mention the war and we should be ok.

Myranda

I'm working in a University as an IT Tech ... (part time)

Oddly though our job sounds totally different and groovy - our Uni has a strangely segregated and separate pair of IT teams. 

The biggest of the teams is ILS (Information and Library Services (as an aside, what's in a library if NOT information?) and they are the traditional "have you tried turning it off and on again?" bunch.

The small team is where I work - we are faculty tech support for the computing faculty, so we get to do all sorts of different stuff and learn new skills (the other week I was able to play with the hugely expensive Mobile Phone Forensics tools... and over summer I'm hopefully getting involved in the virtualisation of several computer labs).

So, are there any other Uni jobs that might be different which utilise the same sorts of skills?

** There is a third team - who apparently have scent-free-poop who can do no wrong - Networking Infrastructure... These are the same people who have put multiple Wireless Access Points in a single room and have them set up with multiple wireless VLANs ... AND EVERY SINGLE ONE IS ON THE SAME CHANNEL, but it's down to our laptops being at fault, not the shoddy set-up... 

Also, our set-up with multiple teams has basically f***ed the teaching year for all the computing students... the faculty network/server was hacked last June - the uni management freaked out and ordered it turned off, but didn't authorise any kind of replacement (by way of ILS taking over) until October ... the people in ILS set-up Task-Manager so poorly that 40 PCs need to have the covers taken off, a drive unplugged and THEN run TM to install OS, before re-plugging the other drive. The Domain servers keep forgetting whole rooms full of PCs so "No Logon Servers are available..."

Our team has managed to screw up big-time too though - 40 cloned drives in 40 identical PCs, and then we boot them, we somehow have 40 different setups... some missing software, some not running some software, some not working at all... each one not working in slightly different ways. Oh the fun. And none of those 40 machines is able to retain a set time/date (we have changed CMOS battery)

OK, university IT departments are terrible... RUN ... RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN.

If you want to do sometihng new though - maybe try Open University, or similar home-study things that you can get some sort of recognisable certification or qualification, or do some sort of home project that you can detail somehow, so a prospective employer can see your MadSkillz(tm).

I've been stuck in a job with no prospects no hope of change, and it sucks bum-juice

Drew_TNBD

Notionally I'm the QA and Tech Support Manager for FXpansion. But for the last couple of years I've been in an oversight role with those things, because I've been focusing on product development for the BFD line. Anything from conceiving products, to researching our user opinions, to skinning up, hitting, and recording drums, to editing and mixing them, productizing them, doing videos and audio demos for them, and generally being a drum centric sex machine.

Longtallronnie

I'm a lighthouse technician for Trinity House. Spend most my time travelling up, down and off the coast maintaining equipment - nav lights, fog signals, DGPS gear, gensets etc. 
I love it, I get paid to travel to some beautiful places around the country and the work is interesting/challenging. I've got a great boss/management and work with a bunch of really nice people. 
Only downsides are being away from home a lot and the money could be better. 

Sporky

Myranda said:

(as an aside, what's in a library if NOT information?)

I can think of two possibilities:

1) Books you have already read and can remember in their entirety.
2) A Library-of-Babel style setup where every book has the same number of pages and characters per page in every possible combination. The total informational content would thus be zero as it would not be possible to resolve uncertainty using said library.

I don't think any actual library meets either specification.

digitalscream

Myranda said:

OK, university IT departments are terrible... RUN ... RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN.

Here's the thing...and I believe I mentioned this back when you were first considering IT as a career...

Everybody is convinced that their IT department is the worst in existence. Then they move somewhere else, and realise that it's just as bad (if not worse). Then they move up a role or two and discover the depth of the shit, so they move somewhere else...

Nobody's wrong - every IT department is indeed worse then every other IT department. They're all shit beyond redemption, and I'm reasonably convinced that there's actually no way to fix them.

Yes, it's possible I've been doing this for far too long. What of it?

boogieman

I retired 4 years ago. I worked in retail management when I first left college. Terrible pay, the hours are rubbish, you have to deal with the great unwashed every day including Sundays, the only staff who will work for the pittance that shopwork pays are kids or disinterested mums doing the job while their kids are at school. It's a shit job. Definitely don't do that. 

I moved on to building maintenance after that, working for BT. I liked it and stayed for 25 years. I got training on lots of things like air conditioning plant, lifts, boilers, fire alarms and DC power supplies but the role I enjoyed the most was working on standby diesel generators. The pay was reasonable, the hours were good and it was mostly stress free. The best part was it was a job where I didn't actually dread Monday mornings.