Chuckanut
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Gosh YES, it was hard.
Now I find retirement much nicer. Working Hard? No, Hardly Working.
Now I find retirement much nicer. Working Hard? No, Hardly Working.
...Certain kinds of mental work can be hard in different ways. Some of the "office" work you can leave behind and not have to worry about it in the evenings or on vacation. Some of it you can't and it's almost always with you. That's a different kind of hard work.
I always think of "working hard" as digging ditches, not going into an office. But I suppose everyone has their own perspective.
1) Rotating shiftwork (working days, swings, mids in succession - totally screws up your body clock until you feel like you are moving through jello)
Most of the time I enjoy my work: an air-conditioned operating room (okay, it's really cold), working with other medical professionals, meeting all kinds and ages of people from different walks of life makes my job interesting. Then there's . . . 2 days ago, the rupturing aortic aneurysm patient taken emergently to the operating room, the kind that John Ritter and Alan Thicke had. Torrential blood loss and massive blood transfusions, for 5 hours. A heroic effort by all, but couldn't change the course of events. It was mentally draining and I would say very hard work.
... Wouldn't call it "hard" work but later career included such joy as permitting a landfill, a 10 year construction lawsuit, and managing dwindling water supplies during a drought, knowing failure was greater than a 10% probability. Hard? No. Terribly unpleasant? Absolutely.