I have been retired for about three weeks now.  The first almost two weeks were spent on vacation, so they almost don’t count.  Here is a list of the many things I will not miss about my last job (I was there for 12 years).

1.  Punching a time-clock.  After much of a career as a salaried employee, I was hourly at my last job.  That time-clock represented an absence of trust by my employer that he would get a full day’s work out of me.  The worst part of it was that if I wanted to take vacation, I had to submit my request on the time clock, and it was a big pain in the patootie.
2. Daily “standup meetings”.  My group was forced to justify our work every day, even on Mondays when we had not yet run our workbenches, which told us what needed to be ordered that week.  Many of the “past due” items on our benches were way out of our control, also.  I felt like a third-grader being called on by the teacher.
3. Driver Measures, and Action Plans.
4. The PO Burndown Spreadsheet, where we had to register that we had ordered something, requiring double work for each order placed.  And, after the first six months of the new management, that spreadsheet was mostly current and we couldn’t be held to account for things beyond our control.
5. Cancel and pushout messages.  Our customers were canceling their orders right and left, and our lives were a mess with continually pushing out orders that had already been pushed out once or twice.
6. Expedite messages, especially for orders that had just been pushed out.
7. The “guest network” that kicked me out whenever my device went to sleep, so I had to log back on every time it woke up.
8. No “personal folders” in Microsoft Outlook.  Before the company was sold, I had extensive personal folders where I would file emails on particular issues.  If I wanted to know which engineer was responsible for an issue, I just had to go to my folder for the supplier and search, and find what I needed.  The new parent company forbid personal folders, so I was always short of information.  Very frustrating.
9. Having to put on my mask whenever I got up from my desk, even to walk the 10 steps to the printer and back.  The factory had been Covid-free since April.
10. Spiders.  One of the engineers’ desk was on my walking route to the stock room, and she kept three plastic spiders at the edge of her desk, where I had to look at them every time I passed the desk.  I hate spiders, so that did not improve my mood.
11. Constant background noise, from always-running HVAC equipment, and intermittent machine noise.  In 2015 the factory did a complete remodel, tearing down internal walls and bringing big screw-machines and metal-punching machines out into the open.  This increased the ambient noise level dramatically, and management never believed the employees when they said the noise was bothersome.  Their answer: Wear your noise-canceling headphones.  Many of us did that, but it decreased situational awareness and made us more-distant from our coworkers.
12. A certain bald head.  The owner of that head was the cause of many resignations from our group, but not mine.  And I will not miss it one bit.