… and a few days ago I met one of it’s accomplices: the digital fax. At the office we receive our faxes digitally and I’m a back-up person to check every once in a while whether there are any new faxes. It’s mostly advertisements and contracts with our clients. But this morning my boring task of clicking on the shortcut ‘fax’ in my task bar suddenly got a whole lot more exciting.
In the ‘fax’ folder was, for no obvious reason, a document containing all the net salaries of my colleagues. Something I’m definitely not entitled to see. Consequently, of course, my eyes were glued to the screen, absorbing as much as I could of this forbidden information. I had to break myself away from the computer to stop me from knowing too much of what I wasn’t supposed to know. And to minimize the damage done to my self-esteem. I’d just realized I wasn’t relatively earning as much as I had assumed.
I believe salary is something every employee should whine and complain about. Just as every employer should try to keep payments as low as possible without making their work force unhappy. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Despite this attitude, I had finally been quite happy with my salary. I’d made a huge jump forward as a result of my last job evaluation a few months back. I felt needed, appreciated, maybe even irreplaceable and indispensable. And properly rewarded. So this discovery was definitely a damper on the delights of my job.
I took the opportunity of instant messaging to slink off to Matt and complain and sulk about this injustice. After his initial astonishment he impressed upon me that I didn’t need to worry and that I did extremely well for my age and experience.
Age and experience. The words resounded in my head for a few minutes. There they were again, the two variables that made salary and the negotiations about it so vicious for me. I’m relatively young, because I’d always been quite young at school and got my Masters pretty easily. And my current employer is my first real job. So I’m young with little experience. This instantly pushes my salary miles and miles down.
I honestly don’t get it. Why should experience and age have to matter so much when it comes to what you earn? Shouldn’t it all be about how well you perform at your job? It makes me both competitive and willing to work harder, and fatalistic, dejected, angry and unmotivated. It usually differs from time to time which of the two is predominant.
Apparently I’m still too much used to university. There it didn’t matter how old you were, or how many studies you had already successfully completed. Everybody was fairly equal, standing for the same task. Purely your achievements, effort and correct answers resulted in your reward: some more study points, and eventually a diploma.
This made me think. It would be quite funny, receiving diplomas in the work place. All these diplomas would influence or even determine the height of your salary. This way the harder you work and the higher the quality of what you did, the higher your salary would be. I guess this doesn’t rule out the experience factor. But at least this way age wouldn’t matter.
On the other hand, I’m still waiting to receive the diploma for my second Bachelor. I’ve completed this study for two years now, but for some reason, unknown to everybody, my university is until today unable to produce a correct diploma for this achievement. Of course it has something to do with rules, rules, bureaucracy and some more rules. If I was to be paid my salary according to my diplomas, I would have been underpaid for two years now. At least my work pays on time. They don’t have rules like university. For instance that they promise to check your exams in two weeks and then making it four. Or eight if accidentally your tutor has a burn-out again. So maybe I shouldn’t think back longingly to university at all. At least at the office I know what to expect.
Maybe when I turn older and have more working experience, I’ll learn to appreciate work above university. And if I don’t, at least I’m sure I’ll be granted a higher salary by then.
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Oh I hear ya on that one! I hear that all the time “you actually make very good for your age” Oh realllllyyyyy???!! Even though I am doing better then some other co-workers that don’t give a damn?? Hmm…always interesting I tell ya!!
Left by Blondie on Friday, January 19th, 2007