I do enjoy my job. Since I work for my father-in-law, I'm able to do AutoCAD for a living without having any sort of degree.  He gets cheap CAD, and I get to do something I couldn't do anywhere else. Plus, he's a great boss and is sympathetic to my mental health issues, which is huge.

Also, it's a job that challenges you, and that helps it from getting boring.

I'm retired (disability) but have had jobs that include library assistant, phone salesman, and supermarket worker. They have been OK to terrible.

When I was a kid, my BFF and I dreamt about starting an airplane manufacturer. We would spend countless hours drawing our designs on looseleaf paper. To this day, I have a love for aviation, but neurologically and physically cannot even drive a car, much less fly a Cessna 172 or HondaJet. But if I didn't have those problems, I reckon I'd be a flight instructor. I enjoy following YouTube accounts of such people.
https://www.youtube.com/user/MrAviation101
https://www.youtube.com/user/FlightChops
https://www.youtube.com/user/MzeroAFlightTraining

(January 9, 2016 at 8:46 pm)Mermaid Wrote:

(January 9, 2016 at 8:44 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: I like running the farm these days, and while I don't really miss the defense contractor stint, it was interesting.  I accidentally put a constraint on a space shuttle launch, once.

Odd feeling walking into the department manager's office and informing him the company might be on the evening news.  (we weren't, but I didn't know that at the time).  

That sort of thing never happens in a field of soybeans . . . .

Yyyyeah. I'm gonna have to go ahead and ask you to elaborate on what appears to be a very interesting story here. (if you can).

The company I worked for made quite a few different items for aerospace applications.  Equipment for the space shuttle too.

When NASA returns an item for repair (if they think it is broken) or refurbishment (if it has a certain number of hours or flights on it) it will usually be subjected to an incoming inspection and testing. 

Then it would be disassembled, gone over thoroughly, worn/broken items replaced, put back together, tested some more, and shipped back to the cape.

I handled some of the paperwork (I rarely saw the equipment, and only ever touched a space flown item once) and for the most part, translated the 'engineering lingo' into verbiage the shuttle program managers could deal with.  (hard to imagine, but many engineers are functionally illiterate, got me a job however, as I'm fluent in both worlds).

Anyhow, on one occasion, an item was reported to NASA for failing testing after refurbishment rather than as a newly returned item, as was the actual case.  The paperwork passed through my hands, and I had no way of discerning the discrepancy. 

Anyhow, as luck would have it, a launch was imminent, and having a device fail unexpectedly at our facility while an identical unit was in the butt end of Atlantis while it was on the launch pad led to considerable excitement at the cape when my report got there.

I received a phone call, (quite soon after faxing the 'bad' paperwork out) and was informed our company was now a constraint for the next launch.

Even before I crapped my pants, I dashed over to the managers office and gave him the bad news.  Figured he might as well experience brown trousers time with me too.

Fortunately, once I called the engineer that had reported the incorrect testing info to me, we were able to append the original report, resubmit, and get off the launch constraint list. Only took several hours of sweating and teeth gnashing.

Always struck me funny, if we needed to fax something to a customer, REGARDLESS of the circumstances, we still had to follow company policy for sending faxes.  I had to have the original and a copy in my file, and I had to send 2 copies to the fax department (via interoffice mailer if not urgent, or walk it down myself a 1/4 mile to the fax room) so they could keep a copy for their files, and send one back to me with their paperwork for sending the fax.  There was also some paperwork I did not see, a charge sheet would go back to my managers secretary as our department would have to keep track of the charges for sending the fax as faxing was a budget item there.  There was probably other paperwork involved (probably copies of everything to corporate, and more copies to legal).

Anyhow,  Atlantis launched on time, and all was well.

That's a story for the ages. No stress there at all. Sheesh!

The shuttle stuff was easy, for me the day in day out grand mal colonic eruption was the bomb bay mechanism controls for the B-2 bomber.

That program was a freaking nightmare. At some point it became a joke for me, and the AF brass and my boss could tell.

Still, as Saddam Hussein discovered, the B-1 bomber bomb bay mechanism worked really, really, really well. I don't know if Saddam or myself were more surprised.

As was pointed out to me (several) times by the AF, the ENTIRE point of the B-1 Bomber is to carry the bomb bay mechanism to somewhere in the vicinity of the target for it to do it's thing.

That the B-2 bomber played a prominent role in the Judgement Day War in the Terminator movie franchise is a source of endless pride to me.

Truly hated the emergency room medicine job. 
You need delusions of grandeur to survive there and I didn't have them.

The engineering job for the little company was great initially.
We had hopes of success and growth.
But then it happened and it turns out that with success and growth the problems don't go away.  They get bigger too.

Now I'm retired and sponging off my better half.
It's wonderful.

(January 10, 2016 at 12:32 am)vorlon13 Wrote: As was pointed out to me (several) times by the AF, the ENTIRE point of the B-1 Bomber is to carry the bomb bay mechanism to somewhere in the vicinity of the target for it to do it's thing.

That the B-2 bomber played a prominent role in the Judgement Day War in the Terminator movie franchise is a source of endless pride to me.

You keep switching between B-1 and B-2.  They're completely different kinds of bombers, and i'm mightily confused

(January 10, 2016 at 12:51 am)JuliaL Wrote: Truly hated the emergency room medicine job. 
You need delusions of grandeur to survive there and I didn't have them.

The engineering job for the little company was great initially.
We had hopes of success and growth.
But then it happened and it turns out that with success and growth the problems don't go away.  They get bigger too.

Now I'm retired and sponging off my better half.
It's wonderful.

That's my life goal.

I am a pornographer. Some of my work day is spent looking at naked women and men for inspiration, and the rest is spent writing luridly described scenes of people fucking. I work from home and can take breaks whenever I want, so... yeah, I like my job.

The big downside is that, since I do set my own hours and my revenue is based entirely around my productivity, all hours are work hours. I don't get weekends off or anything like that, and even if I am working I need to be getting stuff down onto a page, making writer's block completely crippling. It's a pretty inconsistent job, really: some days I'll work for two hours, some days it'll be a Saturday and I'll go from nine in the morning to two in the next morning.

Oh, also, since I take on private commissioners too, I have to deal with difficult people injecting themselves into my art, who don't exactly see themselves as held to professional standards. So they make contact outside of business hours and expect replies within fifteen minutes... people are terrible when they're paying you for something, even if it's cash on delivery, not cash in advance.