Does anyone actually enjoy their jobs??

[Sherringford Hovis]

I've just quit the best job I've ever had.

Inconsolable.

[Underturd]

Fluffer?

[Cloud]

"It depends"

It's one of those that varies a lot, I'm a combination of IT and marketing.  If I'm doing things like cobbling together a bunch of scripts to make "magic" happen on the IT side or taking a bunch of neat pics on the marketing side and being appreciated for it, and it's passing the time nicely then I do actually kind of enjoy it. 

If like now I'm kind of not sure what to tackle next (I have plenty to do, I guess it's all just stuff I'm not in the mood for), or if there are things on my mind, or I'm too tired, not so much.  Or if I'm trying to do a *little* bit of my own thing on the side, because whilst I'd love to do it in my free time, by the time I go home I'm too knackered to even think, and everyone is like "ooh let's walk behind your desk constantly to see what you're up to" and making it really difficult that's somewhat frustrating.  Which I know is a self entitlement I have no right to because they don't pay me to do stuff for myself but urghhh it just feels like nothing of my own would ever get done if I can't do a little bit at work.  Then I think I just get stubborn about it and end up posting on forums...

[Sherringford Hovis]

Fluffer?

Fluffers haven't been a thing since the late Nineties when  Viagra became widely available, Grandad.

Does begin with an "F" though, and involves squirting and being a popular though unimaginative female fantasy figure.

[imitationleather]

I think it's more that the budgets of pornography productions have been cut to the bone that has seen the Fluffers back in the dole queue.

If you're doing a porn shoot now you probably don't have the breathing space in the bank to stretch to more than two crew. Possibly three if you are going all out.

Don't ask me how I know this. I made it up.

[iamcoop]

In the excellent Jon Ronson audiobook "The Butterfly Effect" (about the decline of the porn industry) he's on the set of a porn film and notices that the male performers are watching online porn on their phones to get themselves hard in between scenes where they're having actual sex with women and said women are wandering around with no clothes on.

[Underturd]

Fluffers haven't been a thing since the late Nineties when  Viagra became widely available, Grandad.

I'm old :-(

[lauraxsynthesis]

Mine was going rather well, but last week our funder suddenly demanded 4x more admin bullshit that is NOT in our contract so we're wasting time pushing back on that instead of doing what I'm actually meant to be doing. Stressed me out so much I reckon that's why I've had a cold since Friday and today my voice is a croak.

[thugler]

No basically hate it, it's depressing. But have had a lot worse. All I aim for is bearability. I try to change every couple of years to keep it from getting too boring.

[Underturd]

I loved my last job, but after I knew I was leaving it the last few weeks were a bind and I kind of hated it by the end. I wonder if I'd still have loved it if it wasn't that I was going to be leaving.

[jamiefairlie]

The wouldn't call pay 'compensation' if you were meant to enjoy it.

[Brian Freeze]

I applied to be an embalmer. I would've absolutely loved that job. Obviously dealing with the corpses would be a nightmare but it'd be offset by telling people what my job is and looking at their faces.

But I didn't even get an interview even though I ticked the thing saying I have "issues" and so they have to give me one. Another dream dead and so no I do not have a job I enjoy.

I applied to be an embalmed too. Like you I didn't end up even getting an interview. It was a hell of a slingshot and quite a change of career but I was up for It.

Haven't got many interviews lately, had a mad rush a few weeks ago when being off work with Covid coincided with about 15 suitable positions being open for application.

Not a fucking sausage and at least three of them I was ideal for the job. Fuck all back other than three notifications of receiving applications (don't call us, we'll call you). Now Im back at work Im too busy and knackered to look around again.

Approaching fifty and feeling a bit desperate, not happy here but can cope. Really enjoyed last job but it was a rare set of skills and circumstances that made it ideal.

[imitationleather]

You applied to be embalmed?  That's the funniest thing I've read all week!

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

Yes, I do a fair bit of MTPE (machine translation post-editing) and sometimes the machine translation works, other times it's so bad they'd be better off having a translator doing it from scratch. I've been told not to use Google Translate for work, because 1) confidentiality issues and 2) it's shite.

I'm an in-house translator (German>English) and currently contending with IT wanting to roll out DeepL Pro, but not interested in other MT solutions using our own data from human translation using CAT tools, which has proven frustrating.

I'm tech savvy and see MT as another tool, but still enjoy translation. I still see MT's limitations into German, and most stuff we do, I'd not be able to put through MT with enough confidence.

[Pink Gregory]

enjoy the benefits of the job - largely work alone, outside, plan my own work, little to no micromanagement, more holiday than most and a shutdown over christmas, doesn't pay great but it's enough

but the work itself can be mind-numbingly tedious and you're largely doing the same thing day-in-day-out and I'm very wary of losing the few skills that I have due to not having any cause to use them. 

[Lost Oliver]

Some days, yes, most of the time, no. I moved into care work a few years ago and kinda regret it now. I get to not be in an office, I get to move around all day (kinda helps when you're as fidgety as me), and I have an amazing rota whihc means I get 4 days off a week. However, the job is extremely traumatic at times. It's working with people with severe autism and challenging behaviour, so I feel on edge every second that I'm there. Couple that with the fact that nobody else really wants to be there with 20% of the staff team on sick at any one point, it's beginning to have an effect on my mind.

Having slagged off being in offices all my life I'd reallly be happy to be given the chance to go back to it.

[thenoise]

Stay at home Dad. Love it, apart from the crippling loneliness. Although getting blind drunk with my colleagues every Friday night to deal with the pain of a dead end job was taking its toll on my health, in hindsight I appreciate the camaraderie in the face of a common foe.

[Jerrykeshton]

I'm a marketing muppet working from home for a contractor on various government programmes.

I hate it, largely because the company I work for are dicks. I don't mind most of the actual work.

[pancreas]

I prove theorems that no-one cares about. But I get a lot of time to do this and I like it. Teaching load is practically nothing. It's disgusting, really. Such an easy ride, I was able to piss off to Thailand for two weeks in the middle of term without even arranging cover. So I can't complain.

By way of atonement, I do spend quite a lot of time dealing with union casework on an entirely voluntary basis. I end up speaking to a lot of fuckwits from across the university who cannot stand up for themselves or read procedure documents—and because of their diffidence are absolutely part of the fucking problem. Many of these people are paid substantially more than me, despite being essentially no different from amoebas.

[pancreas]

You wouldn't believe it, but I actually have a pretty good bedside manner. I'm the one they all ask for, in amoeba-ville.

[GMTV]

I have loved my job for a long time, being an engineering manager in the, ahem, "energy" sector.

Getting paid a reasonable sum of money to solve problems, do calculations etc. I feel very lucky. And even more so now where I'm overseeing people doing a lot of the work. So I get to solve problems without doing a lot of the more boring stuff.

It is tremendously stressful though and I wonder what long term damage to my health I'm doing though. When I have a break of a fortnight or so and the pressure is off I do sometimes think, why am I putting myself through this, and is this how most normal people feel. As my interests are very narrow, sometimes I see people with loads of hobbies and think how do they have the time and brain capacity to do all that stuff? My head is mush by the end of each week. But I guess the draw of decent money and the cut and thrust of big engineering projects keeps me going back for more.

[Steve Faeces]

Yes and no. Yes in that my time is largely my own, the pay is acceptable, generous annual leave and broadly what I do is societally useful.

No in that the sector is close to collapsing and that the two groups I have most contact with, academics and students, I find increasingly difficult to get on with. Taking academics, I just don't like being treated like "the help". I've written journal articles and have postgraduate qualifications but manage to not make that my whole personality and reason to treat people like shit. Not all academics obviously, but quite a few. Generally the more STEM adjacent tend to be sound. The worst almost always the ones doing work at the fringes of credibility in the arts. It goes without saying that I don't blame students for being pissed off at the amount of debt they have to take on or their university experience, but a Labour government turning service users into consumers has led to students behaving like consumers and there are ramifications for those of us on the receiving end of that.

[shiftwork2]

Yes.

[dr beat]

Edit: no, maybe in the morning

[LurkMcGee]

Yeah, it's pretty tidy. Get along with my team, the work is sound and has its challenges at time to keep the brain going. Nothing crazy, just working IT support at service desk level.

I get flexi time and work mostly from home. Get time off when I need it and have a decent balance of work and the lifings.

Did come from a job previously having to speak to people on the phone, which ramped up its self just as I was changing my job (in the middle of covid) and reminded me I was over that type of work, after doing it for 5 years.

[WhoMe]

The money was never good but I worked in a good team, got a fair bit of training and the work was relatively local and varied. We've since switched focus to large infrastructure projects which are fecking miles away, have tonnes of procedural and personal blockers on actually doing the work and the hours are excessive. Moving next month to a new job that solves all of those gripes and is more in line with the reason I went back to college to study conservation almost 10 years ago, so, hopefully in a couple of months I can answer 'yes' to the original question.

[dex]

I enjoy parts of my job, doing the actual tasks and making things better than you find them -but as per usual its the people you work with, the myopic obsession of managers of achieving metrics/KPIs and making bank that I need to somehow not let bother me so much. Meh.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

Yeah, on the whole. I get to work out on site, I can set my own schedule so that I can do office work if it's lashing rain, I get a very nice amount of annual leave, I have a good boss, I like my co-workers, the work I do is kind of important. I wouldn't call it a career exactly, it's not what I trained for (though I have worked in jobs where my degree was more relevant), but neither is it a starving dog I have to feed.

However I've never been the kind of person who wanted or needed personal or spiritual fulfilment from her job. I have other outlets for that, and I would encourage everyone to find something else other than work that brings them joy, a sense of accomplishment, socialisation etc.

[Minami Minegishi]

I left a Professorship at the end of 2022 because I was losing my mind. Now I do HE consultancy and various small, self-employed publishing and writing gigs.

I fucking love it.

[Dex Sawash]

I've just quit the best job I've ever had.

Inconsolable.

what're you gonna do? back to whatever it was before?