I'd say I had about 90 percent satisfaction for the 22 years I worked as an investigator doing security clearance investigations as an employee the U.S. Government. I love the opportunities I had to travel, explore the world, and meet interesting people. Then my job was privatized, and the philosophy went from "do a good job, efficiently" to "do it cheap and fast, and don't do anything more than the minimum requirements. My job satisfaction went down to about 25 percent. I made a lot of money, quit after three years, and got a windfall from the sale of my employer's stock. Now I'm a bum, and my job satisfaction is 180 percent - even better than Bobert's.

Ironically, both the quality and quantity of my work went down when we privatized. Instead of following common sense and a quality-oriented philosophy, we had to follow all sorts of nit-picky government regulations that were put in place to control our managers' "cheap and quick" philosophy.

-Joe Offer-