Greatest career accomplishment (unemployed, jobs, careers, company)

[slackjaw]

I was in this discussion over beers the other night, and in a possibly sad indicator of my personal achievements I came up with:

I have not had to use an alarm clock in over ten years. Yeah I know sounds weak but when I think about it and how much I used to hate pressing that snooze button while rationalizing which things I'll cut out (breakfast, ironing) for another few minutes, I'm quite proud of this. I've somehow either had jobs where nobody gave a **** when you showed up as long as you did your eight hours or worked from home for over a decade now, and don't even own an alarm clock anymore.

I couldn't imagine going back to hearing one bleep in the morning.

So... what have ya'll done career-wise that merits admiration?

[Jesse69]

My best career achievement was working at my last job on historic stuff... I worked at Jacobs ESCG and passed their Proe test to work there... I did Proe stuff on things that went into the Space Shuttle, Space Station, and Lunar Lander [canceled project by Obama]. This was the best most interesting job I ever had. But despite this job I have been 112 weeks unemployed after being laid off.

[Soda120]

Greatest career accomplishment? Sadly, nothing yet. For necessity's sake, I've had "jobs", not "careers".

However, my greatest accomplishments are OUTSIDE work.

[Mrs. Skeffington]

When I worked at a law firm, we had a repeat client who had a succession of theft charges due to drug abuse. His mother was attempting to help him, and we got to talking after office hours one evening, one mom to another. She told me the judge would go easier on him if he got into counseling, but she could not get him in anywhere. I had worked for a psychological practice years ago, and knew a therapist who would be perfect to assist this kid. I called the practice, they remembered me, and got the kid in with the therapist. The mom was very grateful, and my boss was impressed. Just helping that poor mother, though, made me feel very good. Unfortunately, I was let go a few months later, so I never found out what happened.

[yellowsnow]

I'll play. I've done so many different things and enjoyed them all. Here's my best of.

I sang backup for Emmy Lou Harris and Willy Nelson.

I was an actress on a weekly radio show.

I invented a successful procedure to keep an organ system alive outside of the human body. Heart, lungs, and kidneys. I believe I was the first person to do this successfully. It's hard to prove though because people/institutions all over were researching.

I came up with a program to prosecute people for writing worthless checks.

A switch vendor quoted my company a cost of 3.2M dollars to upgrade/add an entry to every individual number working. I wrote a program and implemented it network wide at a cost of 20K.

I wrote another computer program that eliminated monthly billing for $0.00. Saved about 80K per month.

Once I noticed a bunch of wonky network issues in Seattle Main switching office. Everyone said all was good but I sent someone out anyway. Turned out a rectifier had been taken offline and the office was slowly losing power. If I hadn't sent someone out to look up close and personal, a big part of Seattle could have lost phone and data service.

When I was in marketing, I met a 7M dollar quota and still kept my personal integrity intact. My customers loved me and I treated them right. I sold people what they needed and prepared for the future. I always told them to invest in leading edge technology. Leave the bleeding edge technology alone until it evolves into workable products.

I have been paid money to write.

Long list. I'm old but I'm not done yet. I'm open for suggestions. What should I do next?

Oh, and for everyone of these great success stories, I have a couple of equally great failures!