I'm retired from a career of almost forty years in public service, the first half running special programs for the state employment service, then the second half in administrative law, adjudicating disputed unemployment insurance claims.
I officially retired in 2009, but I actually stopped working in 2008 when I got cancer and started treatment. I had a couple years of sick leave saved up that I was only going to get 20% of its value when I cashed it in, so I called in sick. "Hey, I have cancer and I need a day off. In fact, I need the rest of my life off, so put me on sick leave through my anticipated retirement date." Abusers don't build up a couple years of sick leave, so they gave me no trouble - in fact, they didn't even ask for a doctor's note. (By contrast, I knew people who never had more than a day of sick leave on the books, and who couldn't even go home early without bringing in a doctor's note the next day.)
My pension is 80% of my salary for my highest three years, and thanks to the miracle of deferred compensation, which allowed me to defer something over 30% of my pay, plus the fact that Massachusetts doesn't tax pensions for income tax, I actually got a substantial raise when I retired. So I'm more prosperous in retirement than I ever was when I was working. But the prosperity won't last, because cost of living pension increases will be only a fraction of the real inflation in the cost of living.
Like most civil servants I earned less than the same work would pay in the private sector, but the retirement benefits are pretty good and the health insurance is pretty good - excellent back when I started my career, now just "pretty good" compared to the private sector. Our health insurance used to be better than the private sector across the board, but now we're in between; most private sector workers with insurance have better plans than ours, but we're still better off than many private sector workers who have lousy plans or none at all. Alas, the state's Group Insurance Commission has a fetish about not raising premiums, and the way they manage that is by increasing deductibles and co-pays and cutting coverage. Every year it gets a little bit more like not having insurance. For example, the billings for the first two years of my cancer treatment came to well over $160,000 and my out of pocket costs were about $1000. Early this year I had surgery that was billed at less than $20,000, and my costs were well over $2000. Not an encouraging trend!
My biggest surprise about retirement was time. I removed from my weekly schedule forty hours a week at work and ten more getting back and forth from the office, and I had the idea that those fifty hours would provide me with an increase in my leisure time. Wrong! I'm busier than ever! There were so many things that I should have been doing or wanted to do that I couldn't do while I was working, that they more than fill those fifty hours a week that retirement gave me. The result is that I feel busier than ever! But at least I'm spending my time on myself and my own tasks and chores and affairs, and not the Commonwealth's. And while my to-do list isn't getting any shorter, at least it's stopped getting longer, and there aren't any more critical-and-overdue items on it.
Retirement's not like I expected, but I like it anyway!
I started teaching psychology part-time in 1975. I retired last June, 2010 as a Methodist pastor. 
and then tell them that I wanted them to pay as much as possible into Social Security as they would be paying for me.
