How hard should work be?

Work is called work for a reason I suppose, but it seems like there is a line between work and self-punishment. I was recently reflecting on my grandfather's career (since he recently passed away). One key event struck a chord. My grandfather left the Midwest town of Oxford, IN to become a radio operator on a ship. He studied, traveled down to New Orleans and every week put on a clean shirt and went down to apply for a position as a radio man. It took a long time to land that position, eating through his meager savings, and relying on the charity of his brothers to make it through. But once he was on a crew, he recalled great times and adventures sailing up and down the Caribbean and west Atlantic. Sure the conditions on board were not ideal, and the hours long, the work tedious, but the years flew by.

I am sure that no one in the IT work-a-day world sees their job as an adventure, but surely there must be more than a 9-5 day and a paycheck right?

Challenges abound at my day job with Learn.net including getting a new exciting release out, keeping new bugs out as old bugs are squashed, and trying to support a new web marketing push. The thing I think is missing is the satisfaction of a string of wins which would lead to momentum.

From a development side we are doing great - migrated to Bugzilla and use their XML-RPC interface to automatically track exceptions that occur. We now use container managed authentication with JBoss to secure our application. Customization will be easier too since we started using Velocity template engine. This is nice since we can continue to use java objects, but do not need to deploy changes to templates, and our customers don't need to learn JSP.

All we need to do get marketing on track and its off to the races!