[ale] OT: it is only me or ... ?

[Lightner, Jeff]

That reminds me of the time I was doing budgets with  an assistant department head of another department.  He was over a group of employees who got significant portions of their pay from gratuities.   As we're doing the payroll schedule he tells me it must be wrong because it had several of them making more overall than him.   I laughed at him and said "Welcome to middle management".   

He actually later stepped down from his job to become one of those employees because he decided the money was more important than the management "prestige".     At that he was smarter than me - I wasn't smart enough to get out of management until a couple of years later.   I took a significant pay cut to transition to full time IT but within a few years was making more and was much happier.   These days I equate climbing the corporate ladder to Road Runner cartoons wherein the Wile E. Coyote is rapidly climbing up a ladder even though the ladder has already fallen off the top of a cliff.  Eventually you're going hit bottom no matter how far up you think you got.  



"True story. When I was 28 I quit a very exploitative corporate job where my boss was this 65 year old Depression-Era fossil who believed employees should be loyal and grateful. A few months after quitting, on the bus, I ran into the assistant accountant for the old company, and we discussed my old boss. She told me his salary: it was 18% more than mine had been. He was the regional sales manager: 2 levels above me.
He'd put in 45 years for the company. And all he had to show for it was 18% more than I was getting. If I'd known the company was that ungrateful to their hard-working employees, I'd have quit years earlier.
SteveT"