For the last 6 years I’ve been in corporate tech in America. Currently I am an account engineer for an enterprise level tech company. I make about 120k a year at the minimum. When the markets are good I make about 140k-150k annually.
Apparently society values me but my job is literally pointless. Today I just sat in a zoom meeting while one of the c-level team at Tinder(one of the clients of my company) screamed abuse at us for 20 minutes straight because we took too long to solve an issue “that MIGHT have lost them money had it been worse”. We’re all working adults with our own problems to deal with but we are all cUsToMEr SeRViCE pROfesSIonals so we just sit back, take the abuse and disassociate like how us millennials do best.
After this Tinder exec finishes tantruming like a child, I lean back from my computer and watch a video my girlfriend had sent me which was a cruise missile smashing into an occupied apartment building in Ukraine. The next part of the clip is all the Ukrainian firefighters crawling around in the rubble looking for people to help and save. This sent me on a trip.
I use to be a Firefighter EMT for a very busy department. We worked our asses off and actually made a difference in the community. However, like everything in the US, healthcare and public service is so heavily capitalized on that there was no money to go around to pay us. Captains and Lieutenants I worked with lived in the parking lot in their cars. We all made about $80 for a 24 hour shift after tax. That’s right folks. Tearing apart cars and crawling around in burning buildings for $80 a shift. I was the poorest I have ever been. I had to sell blood just to keep the lights on in my apartment. I never made a bigger difference in the world than this time in my life though. There are people walking around alive today because of my old FF-EMT crew. Children born that otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance because we showed up and saved their parents from a near fatal car crash at 3am in the rain. The list goes on.
After a few years of being financially exploited for slave labor wages by the state, I was injured and doctors told me if I kept being a Firefighter I would probably be walking with a cane by 35. I had no healthcare and I was going into debt. I quit and taught myself how to code and now six years I make more than my old Fire Chief……..but my purpose in the world is being a verbal punching bag for sweaty abusive rich Tinder execs. I get screamed at by rich corporate c-level people when they have bad days and I make tons of money for it but my purpose in the world is fuck-all? I could disappear right now and literally nothing would change in the community.
How did it get like this?????? I did the most important fucking roles in society become so abused with slave wages? When catastrophe happens it isn’t going to be my Account Engineer ass that will come to save you. Or any corporate goon. It will be the nurses, the teachers, the service workers, the garbage men, the builders THE REAL PEOPLE that will be there to save you. My purpose is NULL when anything actually important happens but I make more money…..
Anyways rant over. I get paid a lot to fill a stupid fucking role in this stupid fucking USA society we all live in.