I have been a stay at home dad/Early Retired for the last 5 years. I got a call a few months ago about a job in my old career field (IT). An old co-worker had moved on to another job, and the place he was working had lost one of their employees, and needed somebody for a couple months to cover some of the load and help train somebody from the help-desk into this area as a Junior Unix Admin. They want to promote internal to this position and start a career path for one of the help-desk people. That sounds like a worthy cause and I told them I'd help out for a while, since the job sounded like fun.
Two of the people I'm working with I've known for 15+ years. I've been working there now for about 3 months. I'm having the time of my live, its been a total blast. I figure I can keep having fun for about 9 more months. After that I suspect I'll begin to get bored. (Who knows, maybe not, but I feel the twinges of boredom sometimes even now, the "I've seen this problem before, you solve it by doing X").
I love the hunt of new things, hardware/software, the problems are still new and exciting to me. Getting to work on hardware that I wouldn't even dream of owning at home is fun. I suspect around the 12-18 month mark I will find the environment boring and "limited". This place has some cool things about it, but over all, their data center could condensed into 1000SF or so... We don't get to do any network stuff (different group), no windows stuff (different group)... All we do is manage Unix boxes, which I've been doing since 1989. 99% of problems today I've seen something similar or even identical. Not much new happens anymore. Problems have gotten very easy to solve. Its the same old problem with a twist.
I did find when I first went back I was stressed and worried (haven't done a lot of hardcore IT stuff for 5 years). I got back into it fairly quickly though. It took about 5-6 weeks before I felt comfortable with the "routine"... I don't like change. So if you do go back after leaving for awhile, I'd give it a bit of time to see if it works for you before throwing out the baby with the bathwater type of thing.
Having the freedom to quit if I'm not happy makes being happy a lot easier. I don't let the "annoying" things bother me. I just smile and wave... smile and wave...
maybe that's weird, but it works for me.
An example, that back in the pre ER days would have bothered me: I've been there almost 3 months working for an IT company, and I still can't get into their online time-sheet system. I have to do it by paper. My boss is annoyed and frustrated that they can't get it together at the "corporate office". Every time I think about it I just grin. Almost start laughing out loud... its so funny, that a company that makes its money doing IT services can't even get its own time-sheet application to work for a new employee for 3 months... okay, I've started to LOL... cracks me up. Doesn't bother me at all, if they want to pay me to manually fill out a time-sheet, what do I care.
It also helps that I am only doing 25 hours a week. If I was doing full time I suspect I would just get bored faster.
Laters,
-d.