[fintstone]

Originally Posted by flipper35

A good friend of mine's husband wanted to retire but he was one of the only ones that knew some of the systems where he worked and they kept offering him more money, work at home, set his own hours and so on so he kept working. He finally retired and passed shortly after.

This is what is happening to me. My commute is long and hard and they are trying to reduce office space/utilities significantly...so they will allow me to telework about half the time if I choose. This seems good on the surface because the office spaces sucked anyways. I do some now and it is nice to sleep a couple extra hours, but it is hard to get used to doing stuff from home and internet is lousy. It does, however; make it harder to quit/retire. Also, no one really can screw with me much which is nice at times. I can just say "kiss off, wanker".

Even though it is never all about money (and we are doing pretty well), I am a competitive sort of guy and it is how you keep score (at work). They just can't give me any more because I am already at the top of the scale (rules would prevent it anyways)...so no competition just takes a lot of the fun out of it. The part I hate about work now is really that I cannot get promoted and cannot justify going to something more exciting (due to worse commute/no telework and no more money.