The responses to my retirement post are a real eye opener.

[NJCher]

92. Most jobs suck

And am I ever glad I can work for myself because I love my job as director of school gardens/community gardens. Believe me, I had plenty of jobs I hated. I have this contract, however, and they keep renewing it, and I love it.

However, I thought I would mention the following as a refreshing change of pace. It is in reference to your comment:

I used to argue with management and the union. I told both of them what you are doing is counter productive. Driving, harassing, the workers hurts productivity. The goal should be to make your workers happy, not miserable.

On some of my jobs, I did just that. I worked for a very large international company, privately-owned, who hired me to give recognition to the achievement of their employees. They funded a monthly internal magazine that I wrote and edited, and every article about was about some achievement of their people at work (the company employed around 13,000 at this particular location). The stories didn't have to be work-related, either. While one of my stories might be about an employee who worked with Al Gore on a health committee in DC, another was about a woman who worked in cat rescue on her time off.

I will never forget something she told me. She was a tall, red-headed, vivacious woman with an opinion on everything. She told me she could spot who would be good in cat rescue in the first few minutes of meeting them. She then described herself, LOL. They would be "Tall, opinionated..."

It was great to interview these employees about their work and after-work pursuits and publish stories about them. The recognition meant something to them. One, a doctor entering her sixties, told me she had sent the story to her mother. Mom was almost 90!

On two other jobs I had, I was hired to go around to locations and show managers how to give back to their communities. We had a fund set up where the managers could tap into to donate to local causes. In addition to the financial donations, we would set up fundraisers, based on inquiries made of us through community organizations. That was a fun job, too. I always liked dealing with issues that gave people satisfaction and that made them feel like their company wasn't just a profit seeking entity, sucking everything everywhere dry.

Of course, the companies had image motives for paying for me to do this. In the former situation, the company was privately owned and did not want to lose their people to publicly owned corporations that might give them stock options, for example.

In the latter, they were going to be donating the money anyway, so why not hire me and get a little extra public recognition for it when I was able to get the event publicized?