A Denver cop who was fired after being arrested two years ago for driving more than twice the speed limit, and while drunk, may soon have his job back, following a ruling in his favor by the city's Civil Service Commission. But the city's safety manager is vowing to fight the decision.

Officer Derrick Saunders was arrested in June 2010 after the Colorado State Patrol clocked him going 143 mph in a 55-mph zone. The arresting officer also found Saunders' blood alcohol level to be 0.089, above the legal limit of 0.08.

Connie Robinson has beaten breast cancer but these days feels like a loser because taking time off from work to treat the disease led to her being fired -- twice.

Robinson first learned that she had breast cancer in October 2009, when she was working for an undisclosed Richmond, Va.-area organization as an employment specialist, a TV station there reports. But in mid-December, just as she was winding up chemotherapy, she received a letter from her employer telling her that the leave she was granted under the Family and Medical Leave Act had run its course.

It began as a gallant gesture. An off-the-clock bartender offered to walk a female patron home. But the night would lead to a punctured lung, two surgeries and medical bills that could go as high as $100,000.

Mike Boone of Trusty's Bar in Washington, D.C.'s East Hill neighborhood was walking a customer home earlier this month when a man grabbed the woman's purse. Boone fended off the attacker but the fight left him with eight stab wounds, which included a punctured lung, Washington radio station WTOP reports.

With all the debate surrounding the value of a college degree these days, many young workers and their parents may be glad to hear there are many well paying jobs that don't require higher education.

CareerCast.com recently identified 20 good jobs that need only a high-school diploma, although they do require some additional training. The job-portal didn't rely just on salary to compile its list. It used five sets of criteria to assess the quality of the careers, assigning points to each measure. Those with the lowest overall score achieved the highest rankings and vice versa.

Nearly a quarter of a million dollars. That's how much a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee was paid last year under a presidential program that recognizes exceptional performance on the job.

The government worker, a veterinarian, was paid $179,700 in base salary and given a $62,895 "service bonus" for distinguished performance, according to a database recently created to track the salaries of more than 1 million government workers. The well-paid employee was one of three federal workers to receive such a generous bonus, which is equal to 35 percent of base pay, according to the database, developed by the Asbury Park Press of New Jersey (via KUSA).

Sometimes it doesn't pay to do the right thing. Just ask John Chevilott, a former public-works employee in Wayne County, Mich., who earlier this month found a loaded, snubnosed revolver while mowing grass in Detroit's Brightmoor neighborhood, turned it in and was promptly fired.

"It was damaged, so it could've went off. Surprisingly, it didn't kill the guy on the mower," he told Detroit TV station WJBK. Chevilott (pictured at left) said the crew was waiting for Detroit police to swing by and pick up the gun, but they never showed.

In this era of high unemployment, many parents and students wonder which college degrees pay off -- and which don't.

A recent study by Georgetown University Center on Education looked at earnings and unemployment rates among recent and seasoned degree holders as well as those with graduate degrees and found dramatic differences, depending on their majors.

So which degrees ranked among the worst for recent grads looking for a job?

In this era of tight school budgets, it's perhaps not surprising that Pittsburgh teacher George Kirk wasn't able to secure the funds he needed to purchase safety glasses and special jackets for his welding students.

But the former Pittsburgh Public Schools employee alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday that it wasn't a lack of resources, but rather a bias against men by a predominately female-run department that eventually resulted in his furlough last year and the discontinuation of the welding program at the district's Career and Technical Education Department.

There's no shortage of workers who get fired for doing stupid things on the job. Take, for example, Tamara Vangundy, the Indiana coroner who earlier this month reportedly showed up at a crime scene intoxicated and was subsequently charged with drunk driving.

But some people also have very weird reasons for quitting their jobs, according to a recent survey of employers by the staffing firm OfficeTeam. In telephone interviews with more than 1,300 senior managers at U.S. and Canadian companies with 20 or more employees, managers reported some strange excuses. There was the worker who said that he was making too much money and felt that he wasn't worth it. Another said he needed to stay home -- to feed his dog.

It's one of those recurring debates in the digital age: Why are so few women working in technology?

Just 9 percent of chief information officers, or CIOs, are women, down from 11 percent last year and 12 percent in 2010, according to a survey released Monday by tech-staffing firm Harvey Nash Group (via Reuters).

About a third of the companies polled said their information technology unit had no women at all within management, yet only half of firms said that they consider women to be underrepresented in their IT departments.

It's one of the most common questions people ask: "What do you do?" It's American's fascination with work that's at the heart of an increasingly popular feature on social-news website Reddit.

Called "IAmA, AMA" -- as in "I am a (fill in your occupation), ask me anything" -- it allows Reddit users, known as "redditors," to ask all kinds of workers about their jobs, regardless of how mundane or weird they are.

The tough economy means many recent college graduates are forced to work unpaid internships or wait tables, until they land a job in their chosen field of study.

But others are taking a different route, cobbling together freelance gigs to make ends meet. Take Yannique Joseph (pictured at left), an aspiring Queens, N.Y.,-based wardrobe stylist.

The 26-year-old is still building a portfolio of her own work, and that can mean lots of down time, since the flow of work is rarely steady.

American workers are increasingly miserable on the job. No wonder: Those who survived mass layoffs during the recent recession often were rewarded with more work for the same or less pay.

A survey released last fall found that nearly a third (32 percent) of U.S. workers considered quitting their jobs, up 9 percentage points from the last time the same survey was taken in 2005. Another found that only 45 percent of American workers were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest level since record-keeping began 22 years earlier.

It's hard to know how far any of us would go to save a colleague's life, but it appears that four New Jersey roofers were willing to risk theirs after a co-worker fell through a factory roof and plunged into a vat of acid 40 feet below.

The workers rescued Martin Davis (pictured at left), a 44-year-old iron worker who was working on the roof of Swepco Tube, a manufacturing plant in northern New Jersey, when he tumbled into the vat Monday morning, The Record of Bergen County reports.

As the nation's baby boomer generation has aged, there's been a corresponding increase in demand for workers to provide health-care services. It comes as little surprise then that the health-care sector has added an average of 28,000 jobs a month during the last 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Not only is the number of health-care related jobs growing, many are also well-paying. They include positions such as case managers, who develop and implement care plans for patients dealing with severe or complicated diagnoses.

When Tamara Vangundy showed up at a crime scene early Thursday morning in suburban Indianapolis, she was stumbling and swaying and reeked of alcohol, police say.

The coroner for Hancock County, Ind., suspected of being drunk, was asked to take a sobriety test, which she failed. Police then took her to the county jail, where a breathalyzer test revealed that she had a blood-alcohol content of .16 -- twice the state's legal limit, Indianapolis TV station WISH reports.

The nation's unemployment rate, however, fell one-tenth of a percent to 8.1 percent. But as was the case last month, the decline had less to with Americans finding jobs than with more of them dropping out of the labor market.

Holli Thomas had a simple request. She wanted to know if the Bettie Page store where she worked in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood could close an hour earlier than its normal 8 p.m. closing time. Thomas and other workers at the vintage clothing store -- named after the iconic 1950s pinup model -- were concerned about their safety, since other nearby retailers closed an hour earlier and the store had no security system.

But Thomas' request, along with other suggestions she had for making the store "the best it could possibly be," were ignored. So she and a co-worker vented on Facebook, and that resulted in their dismissal, according to a National Labor Relations Board decision last week (via Social Media Employment Law Blog).

There are few stories more heart-wrenching than those in which workers take advantage of vulnerable senior citizens. But the case involving 86-year-old Renee Fuld is particularly egregious because the New York City woman also is disabled.

Fuld's aide, Jackie Pokuwaah, 52, was arrested last year for allegedly stealing more than $800,000 from Fuld (pictured at left), who uses a wheelchair to get around. Pokuwaah apparently convinced her patient to write more than 400 checks, payable to the aide, for items such as ice cream, laundry and wallpaper, and then pocketed the cash, the New York Post reports.

Here's a lesson for government employees: If you're found slacking, not only can it be really embarrassing when taxpayers find out, it may land you in the unemployment line.

At least that's what happened in a Florida case involving six lawmen in the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office; their names were published in the media after they allegedly were discovered "idling and loafing" for hours while on the job, West Palm Beach TV station WPTV reports. One admitted watching a movie while on duty.