Metals & Alloys

I attacked this problem by taking early retirement. Now my engineering work takes about 30-60 minutes a day and consists of reading and answering posts on CR-4 and occasionally other forums. This "work" is wonderfully stress free and satisfying.

Shortly before retirement most of my work was an exercise in useless corporate futility with long hours spent on engineering projects that were usually summarily discarded by the company's political process. This was very stressful and wasteful. But the pay was good.

Now I live comfortably on Social Security, my retirement savings and a small pension, am having fun with engineering again and believe I'm actually contributing more than I was before retirement.

Ed Weldon

I worked for a real workaholic, and determined that it is the same as an alcoholic. It is one thing to be a hard worker, (or a hard drinker) and another to be a hard worker, and a workaholic, or an alcoholic. People throw these words around without really thinking about it, or knowing what they are talking about sometimes. A true Workaholic screws things up on the job, or loses money same as an alcoholic, who we recognize has a pathology.

My reply will be similar to Weldon but I also do Yoga and go for morning and evening walks.Earlier I was spending some time with my pet dog who pic is attached but she expired 2 years back.

A workaholic is someone who has no life to go to after work. A hard worker (me) is what a workaholic considers a slack a__.

My stress is relieved when I leave everyday at 5:00. I have a cabin in the mountains on a trout stream. Fishing anyone?

Eh Possum...! (My stress is relieved when I leave everyday at 5:00. I have a cabin in the mountains on a trout stream. Fishing anyone?) Maybe North Carolina isn't such a bad place after all. ("Almost heaven ..... Blue Ridge Mountains.....")

More to the topic; Workaholics. They can be good for short term profits; but in the long run they usually prove to be a problem. They can "burn out" in many ways just when you need them for something important. If leadership encourages the workaholic behavior to spread then the burnout effect in a significant number of employees can be catastrophic. Too often they don't work well with the rest of the team. While their individual productivity helps the mission their overall effect on the other people is negative .

Too often we see the young "tiger" manager providing lots of recognition for his young workaholic subs, who haven't gotten a life yet (BTW). This contributes to the degrading of morale in the rest of the group, who in addition to their regular work find themselves picking up the pieces of projects full of workaholic mistakes and getting little credit for this effort.

Ed Weldon