What three thing I won't miss after I FIRE

[retiringat50]

1 childrens librarian
2 childrens librarian
3 childrens librarian
4 childrens librarian
5 childrens librarian

(oh ya guess who was my boss?!)

 

[Khan]

Being an IT person with a PHB who dislikes computers.

Retired officers who come back as GS employees and don't think they have to change their style.

Working in a large building with several thousand people and all the noise and light and smells adherent thereto.

Alarm clocks.

Venturing out in dark/cold/wet at 0500.

Reorganizing/moving every year or so.

 

[Moemg]

1- taking call
2- spending all night in an OR and report to duty again at 7:am
3-working 12 -13 hour shifts with no breaks
4- having to spend endless hours on the needle stick commitee
5- setting the alarm for 5:15 to be at work for 6:15

but truthfully I liked my job stress and all !

 

[BOBOT]

Just to take a different tack....

...I don't miss a paycheck.

 

[Khan]

...I don't miss a paycheck.

One of the few things I do miss.

 

[Nords]

"Shutdown Rover, 2JV (doo-da, doo-da...)"

I'm guessing your Engineer never had the bright idea to put a voice-activated recorder on his stateroom 2JV connection and then replay the tapes for Engineering Department training. Of course that's just the story I heard, I was never personally involved in anything on the 2MC other than official IC Manual vocabulary...

After SRO, guess who's got Startup watch? And Maneuvering Stations?
I bet I dream tonight. Gack.

Gonna be nightmares for me. I just flashed on the five-hour surface transit from Holy Loch out to the Irish Sea, where we'd be shivering on the bridge in exposure suits while praying for the wind to shift the diesel exhaust to blow on us and warm us up... take the sub way to work indeed.

 

[USK Coastie]

Clearing the Golden Gate and headed north in 35 ft seas and 40 mph wind. Another day at work in the Guard. Get off the 8-12 watch and hit the showers at 0030. At 0035 lights out dead in water and the emg generator fails to start. Oh yeah all the fun, all the memories.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I got a wicked paper cut from an interoffice mail envelope once.

 

[retire@40]

One word: Deadlines

 

[Steve O]

Well I worked in a steel forge shop for 19 years.

I wont miss getting up at 4:30 5-6 days a week, 48-60 hrs. Spending an hour in traffic in the morning, and 1-2 hours to get home...

Sweating doing hard physical labor all day.

Breathing in diesel fumes and steel dust all day.

The constant noise, I was a blacksmith on a 4000 lb steam hammer.

There were 5 other bigger hammers in the shop, every time these things give a blow it shakes the ground and each blow was loud up to 140 decibels.

The furnaces run at 2350 degrees, in the summer on a hot day it was HOT!!! try 140 degrees.

Quite possibly the worst place in the world to be with a hangover, and that kind of work makes a man thirsty at the end of the day...

Thank god I was well paid, I did my time and now Im living my dream

I saw a lot of guys work there 35-40 years and retire in bad health and die young

Its a 100% employee owned company, when the ESOP quadrupled in 4 years it made many of the people there multi millionaires, me includedO0

Thats why I got out at 39 still young and good looking

There's some guys there that are older than me that have a lot more $$$ and will probably work there until they die

No I dont and wont miss that sweatshop!!!

 

[Sarah in SC]

Whoa, Steve, good for you to save and retire while still young and good looking! I remember spending summers working in my dad's tea factory, about 98% humidity, with a 250 degree tea dryer blowing in your face all day, and thinking how bad it sucked. Made me dream of getting what we called "an ac (air conditioned) job". Your job makes that sound like a cakewalk! Whew!

 

[Notmuchlonger]

I wont miss getting up early. Breathing in coolant. Getting cuts from metal chips.

Talk about some horrible flashbacks I just had.

 

[ziggy29]

Orrrrr...the customer groups who think central IT is a bunch of incompetent jagoffs and secretly implement their own "solutions", which inevitably screws up some major system somewhere. Which takes twice as long to fix when the cowboys claim they didnt do anything.

Or more likely in our case, the customer groups get tired of waiting for IT to get around to doing something they need done -- because IT never has the resources or the so-called "bandwidth" to do it -- so they develop their own "rogue" applications which aren't centrally managed or proficiently administered. And typically IT looks the other way, because they know the business needs this ASAP, and if they balked the only other alternative would be for IT to actually do it now -- and not in a couple years.

 

[Helen]

Or more likely in our case, the customer groups get tired of waiting for IT to get around to doing something they need done -- because IT never has the resources or the so-called "bandwidth" to do it -- so they develop their own "rogue" applications which aren't centrally managed or proficiently administered. And typically IT looks the other way, because they know the business needs this ASAP, and if they balked the only other alternative would be for IT to actually do it now -- and not in a couple years.

Yes, it's amazing how the complexities grow with each upgrade, yet the resources to do it seem to shrink every years.

My coworker and I are about to hit the breaking point. She can retire in 2 - 3 years and I can go in 5 - 6. I'll really dread it when she leaves, I wish we could both bail at the same time.

 

[Marquette]

So I worked at a company that outsourced to a large service provider to cut costs.

I bailed, but for other reasons.

Then they found out that most of us that were working there only booked 40 hours a week since we were salary. Now that the flipped people were being paid hourly, they started booking everything.

My wife now works at that same company on the business side as a DBA. She runs a workstation under her desk that houses data this Fortune 100 company uses for logistics. She's tried to move it in the data center several times but this outsourcing company won't charge less than $1 million a year to host a small (50 GB) database.

At my current company we're outsourcing IT to an offshore service provider. Along with that, we eliminated a bunch of positions with a hefty severance package and then management was shocked when the majority of those people didn't want to forgo the severance and apply for new jobs. So, we're short-staffed. The business isn't happy. They've started hiring their own contractors to work on the line of business apps because they can't wait for us.

I love this field.

 

[rs0460a]

At my current company we're outsourcing IT to an offshore service provider.

Been there - done that (can you spell B-a-n-g-a-l-o-r-e ? )

One of the many reasons (as an IT Project Manager) I decided to retire (on my own terms).

Sorry to say, but "it's good to be old" (in the IT "profession"). Hey, when I started in the field, "programming" was wiring up boards for unit-record equipment (yes, I am "older than dirt", and proud of it, thank you ).

- Ron

 

[NW-Bound]

And, through it all, we were told to sit on our hands, basically. There were several areas that could have used our help and plenty of innovative things we could have tried, but either our boss (an otherwise rational person) would put a stop to (he didn't want us working on projects outside of the team charter in the event that it'd either break the team up or would cause us to bring on other work that he didn't want to hold on to long-term) or, even better, we couldn't do the work because that'd require a project and we didn't have money to fund new projects. They were happy to pay me to do nothing but couldn't fathom a way to pay me to actually work.

You too? Amazing, what's happening in corporate America. When I started work around 30 years ago, did not see anything like this. A very close friend of mine, who is 10 years older, never saw anything like this either.

 

[SteveR]

Things I won't miss from my j*b?

1. Performance Evaluations

2. Meetings

3. Budgets

4. Dealing with management cowboys and jerks

5. Dealing with Federal and International Regulatory agencies and auditors.

6. Getting up at 6:00 AM

7. Eating two or three meals a day at my desk.

8. Corporate BS in every form and fashion

9. Driving to and from w*rk with 100,000's of other folks.

10. Not having freedom of choice in most things.

 

[Steve O]

The Illinois Tollway

 

[rs0460a]

Another one...

I had to add this comment, since the company I retired from (last year) just announced (yesterday) their shutdown of operations and relocation from the area that I reside.

That is "elimination of uncertainty from future income".

Hey - I (luckly) "survived" ...

- Ron

 

[Goonie]

I had to add this comment, since the company I retired from (last year) just announced (yesterday) their shutdown of operations and relocation from the area that I reside.

That is "elimination of uncertainty from future income".

Hey - I (luckly) "survived" ...

- Ron

My Dad had a similar experience back in the 80's. He had planned all of his adult life to retire on his 62nd birthday. So in early February 1987 he gave his official written notice that he was retiring in May after 39 years there, and also gave them his list of scheduled vacation (7 weeks of it). At the end of February the company announced that they were shutting down in June, and those who wanted to, could put their names in to transfer to one of their other facilities out east.....IF there were openings out there.....otherwise they were SOL. They also informed the employees that unless they had already turned in their vacation notices, they would not be getting any paid vacation time.....unless they transferred.

There were a lot of his co-workers that accused Dad of having an 'inside track' to what was coming down, but he didn't. Being a staunch Union man all of his life, he would have been the last person that management would have confided in. He had told everyone for years that he was retiring @ 62 come hell or high water, and he had simply given the powers-that-be the required 3 month retirement notice. And since he did it before the company's closure announcement, he got his 7 weeks vacation. About 300-400 others weren't so lucky.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

That happened for me with my separation package. The company had a program in place to give everyone a free home computer, and it was written into the package that even if you left you'd get it. Then the downturn hit and the program was scuttled.

But it couldnt be taken out of the separation agreement if you'd already signed it and set a date.

So...everyone who left the company got the free computer. Everyone who stayed didnt. I even got a nifty polo shirt with the program name stitched into it. I guess they had a lot of those and nobody really wanted to wear one...

Sometimes a well timed getaway really works out...

 

[MGYog]

My Dad had a similar experience back in the 80's. He had planned all of his adult life to retire on his 62nd birthday. So in early February 1987 he gave his official written notice that he was retiring in May after 39 years there, and also gave them his list of scheduled vacation (7 weeks of it). At the end of February the company announced that they were shutting down in June, and those who wanted to, could put their names in to transfer to one of their other facilities out east.....IF there were openings out there.....otherwise they were SOL. They also informed the employees that unless they had already turned in their vacation notices, they would not be getting any paid vacation time.....unless they transferred.

.

My DW retired two weeks ago. She actually had gone up May 15 (or thereabouts)to Human Resources to give them the two week notice that she was retiring on May 31st. Lo and behold, an hour after she had gone back to her area, an emergency meeting was called for the entire laboratory and there the lab manager told them that the hospital had decided to close sometime in July or August this year. Furthermore, if they retired prior to that date, they would not get a separation package. The next week she rescinded her resignation (Human Resources allowed her to), and stayed until the hospital was handed off to a surprise buyer Aug 1st. The hospital she worked for did close, and she did not accept an offer of employment from the new corporate owner. Her pension and 403(b), as well as 401(k)s are safe because this was only one hospital of a chain owned by a non-profit corp.

 

[bssc]

Or more likely in our case, the customer groups get tired of waiting for IT to get around to doing something they need done -- because IT never has the resources or the so-called "bandwidth" to do it -- so they develop their own "rogue" applications which aren't centrally managed or proficiently administered. And typically IT looks the other way, because they know the business needs this ASAP, and if they balked the only other alternative would be for IT to actually do it now -- and not in a couple years.

Sounds like what our group does, except it has been institutionalized. Our group is called Business IT because we are not part of the main IT groups.