I think it’s a really sad sign of the times that we (my friends and family, at least) celebrate getting a non-fixed-length employment contract as a major life milestone and opportunity. Comments on the “happy occasion” are usually something like “Now you can buy a car!” “Now you can get a bank loan!” “Now you can have kids!”

I’ve had the rare opportunity to read my CV as written by our marketing people when the company was trying to get some job and had to submit the CVs of all the people that would be working on that job. Boy, what an ego-boost that was! I had no idea I’d been working on all those projects. ;)