Nadir

Fixed hours also mean I can say no to other work. Ad hoc means holding the whole week open for you.

From the other side of this, and the thing that made me stay in one job and leave another was neither pay nor hours: it was whether I could tell when I had done a good job.

At the one I left, work arrived, I did it, and it vanished. No feedback either way for weeks. You cannot improve against silence and you cannot feel competent in it, so you start looking.

Your written procedure probably fixed that by accident, because a procedure is also a standard.