Do you love your job? If so what is it?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Describe your job and what it is about it that you love.
I don’t love my job but I stick at it because they pay me well enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

There are times (about twenty percent of the time) when I do quite like my job because I get to spend my time in the office doing something I quite like - solving a problem with programming (be it asp, sql, vbscript, php, amtote macro language, html, etc…)

But I think I’d rather be doing a job that stimulates me around the clock (being a writer on a science fiction show like BSG sounds good)

2

I am a veterinarian. There are times I like my job. Love? I’ll save that for something that can love me back.

3

I love my job! Its easy, the hours are great and I can drink! My boss is an asshole, however.

I’m retired.

4

I love (not in the literal sense) my job.

I’m an insurance adjuster. What, you say? How can she love such a thankless job?

I see myself as a problem solver. I see people when they are not at their finest. Something awful has happened to them… They’ve totalled their car, their house burned down, their business has been broken into. I can help them. I can guide them through the insurance quagmire and pay them money to get their life back in order.

Do I make them all happy? Hell no, but I do my best to do whatever I can for my customers.

I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now. I’ve had my “oh-my-god-i’m-so-burned-out-i-can’t-raise-another-finger” moments, but overall it has been a good career.

5

I am senior technician for a small fire alarm company. The job is interesting, challenging and mostly rather enjoyable. My boss is a very easy going person. I make a decent living, and I am pretty happy with my job.

6

I’m a technical writer for a very well known computer company. I like my profession a lot, and I love my current job more than anything I’ve done in my entire life.

I like tech writing cuz it fits my personality. I’m disturbingly curious, and I always have been. This job pays me to learn things in the most excruciating detail. I also like to write and create; this job pays me to write well, create diagrams, take videos, write programs, and do everything else I need to do to communicate the information to our users.

The company is great. Besides getting a good salary, I get a bonus for “xmas” and another annual one in March. The company also frequently gives out gifts for special performance; I just got $100 for helping teach a course to new employees. We get three meals a day for free, plus free snacks. We get new hardware and software on a regular basis, and I don’t have to fight for it, they give it me if they think I need it.

The people are almost universally brilliant, fun-loving, well-rounded, and pleasant to work with. Lots of smiling faces, hardly any frowns. Lots of fun, company-sponsored events (a trip to Squaw Valley last year, a trip to Disneyland this year, etc, a holiday party, a summer picnic), lots of guest lecturers and speakers on both technical and non-technical subjects, etc.

My boss is a man I’ve known for 15 years. We worked together at HP, now we’re back together again. He loves the work I do, he trusts me, and I trust him. We go at problems jointly. My colleagues are smart, fun, and helpful.

I’ve given enough hints here that sharp people will figure out where I work. Not all of it is great, but it sure is better than anything else I’ve heard of.

7

I sell small business health insurance. I like it ok most of the time, but don’t think I would ever love any job. I’m just not one of those people that really gets into having a career. The job is there to allow me to afford to do the things I really want to do.

8

Yeah, I do. I design Web sites and it’s something that I would do (and do do) in my spare time if it wasn’t my career. I love it because it’s both logical and creative at the same time. Like I have to use logic to make something look pretty. Awesome!

I don’t like that I’m one of 3 people in the entire company, which means I don’t get to be coding all the time (like this week I spent 3 days babysitting a dying server and the other day creating and sending invoices) but my PROFESSION is one that I love. Add that to the “luxury” of being my own boss, and I’m set for life.

9

I’m a Substitute Teacher…been doing it for almost 20 years. When I spend more than three days in a particular classroom, I’m ready to go do some other subject.

10

I am a 3D/CG animator who works out of his house. I do everything from motion graphics for commercials, to visual effects for films. I really do love it, and it’s something I’ve been working toward doing for a career since I graduated high school (I’m 35 now).

Is it 100% love all the time? Hell no, it’s hard work and late nights, but I’d rather be doing nothing else. Also, I love that I’m finally able to work from my house. This sort of work demands long hours, and flexibility is the key.

11

I’m a Quality Assurance and ISO9001 Management Rep. in high-tech manufacturing. It’s OK, but the constant threat of being laid off (it’s happened to me twice now) sucks big time. Just doing your job isn’t good enough to receive accolades or maintain any form of security. I’d seriously rather be driving a bus or something.

12

Like Gatoescapado, I am retired. Beffore that I was in law enforcement and then legal interpretation.

I miss the mental challenge but never have a vacant moment these days anyway.

13

I love what I do. Unfortunately, if I told you what that was, I’d have to kill you.

14

I’m a professor (I do other things, too, but that’s the main thing right now). Lots of interesting conversations, lots of flexibility, room for interesting projects, encouragement to write and present, cool people, getting paid to read.

15

I love my job sometimes. I’m a librarian. These days I’d say I get a really good meaty reference question maybe once a month, but when I get a good one it’s so awesome! Even when I get a good patron who really wants the bibliographic instruction, that’s great. Recently, I’ve been involved in a training initiative for other librarians, and that’s gotten me really fired up. It’s kind of made me realize how I should be challenged more on a day to day basis, which I guess is bad, but for the duration it’s gotten me really excited. So much, really, that I’m a little worried about “taking over” the committee - I don’t want to run roughshod over everybody, it’s just that I’m so excited about what we can accomplish!

ETA - the thing that drives me nuts about my job - I get to spend a lot of time looking through old newspapers, which is AWESOME… except the patrons only want the obituaties, which is BORING and TEDIOUS. Every so often I get a patron who needs the meat of the paper - the ads or the stories or whatever - and it’s so exciting to show them what there is and how easy it is to get it. I had one high schooler who came in and wanted primary sources on Al Capone. She thought I’d have talked to her classmates, because there were others on the same topic, but I hadn’t - they’d obviously all gone with Google. I was able to show her how to really get at the whole story - how to use the paper indexes and see in the microfilm the WHOLE front page, not just whatever you find scanned on a webpage. How the ads and the other stories and the story’s placement in the newspaper can tell you so much that one isolated scan stolen from somebody else’s work doesn’t. She was so excited, and we don’t even have any Chicago papers on microfilm! That’s when I love the hell out of my job.

16

If someone were paying me to fly a helicopter (or an airplane) I’d LOVE my job! If someone were paying me to make films, I’d love that job too.

I’m a ‘data processor’. Fairly boring. But I’m also an Easytrieve programmer. That’s fun. I like writing the Easytrieves and coming up with solutions. My boss wonders if I something can be done, and I write a program and do it. I like being appreciated. Do I ‘love it’? That would be putting it a bit strongly. But here’s the situation: My office is 100+ miles from my house and I’m not looking for something closer. I like what I do. And I’m telecommuting two days out of five, which is very nice. Even the commute has its advantages: Seattle is much more interesting than here. The only time I don’t like it is the last week of the month when it gets slow. I want more data!

17

Zsofia: One of the Great Jobs of my life was working in the Microforms and Periodicals section of my campus library in my undergrad days. I learned as much there as in my classes. I almost became a librarian because of that, but circumstances led me elsewhere. But it’s up at the top of my list of Great Jobs.

18

I CAN love my job sometimes. I’m a foreign aid worker, and there are times when it is deeply satisfying. There are other times when it really can suck, there’s the usual office crap that comes with any job, but also there is a lot of living in pretty crappy conditions, you get sick a lot, you are often uncomfortable, and you end up with a pretty cynical view of the world.

19

I’m an engineer;

I wouldn’t say I love my job. I work for a huge chemical corporation that compensates its skilled workers in a very mediocre fashion.

A quote from an HR presentation:

“We try to scale our pay to fall within the 25%-50% quartile for the industry”

Which means - at best they pay average. Most people are a bit below.

But I do love some things about the work.

  1. The people I work with. I work in a group of maybe 15 people. There are 3-4 lazy worthless bastards. But the rest I get along with famously - we help each other out, we hang out outside of work, we’re a proper team. It’s nothing that corporate did, we just all happen to be suited to work with each other.

  2. The variety of the job. We make polymers on an industrial scale. There are thousands of variables to tweak and thousands of things that can go wrong day to day. I very rarely feel like, “Man, I’m in a rut. I’m doing the same thing over and over.” There’s always a new product to develop or a new problem to tackle.

  3. The challenge. I have a hybrid position. I’m probably 33% engineer, 33% chemist, 33% sales. Which means I have to work smoothly with all three of these separate disciplines. It’s hard, but it’s never boring. I prefer it 100% to my previous position which was 100% process engineering, where I never interacted with anything but stererotypical engineers and lazy union bastards.

20

I’m a recent college graduate. I work as a handyman, helping my parents renovate our home in exchange for room, board, and a small salary.

I don’t love my job, but it’s a meaningful step forward. I’ll be in Tokyo soon, hopefully with a visa. The adventure continues. Stay tuned.