I'm on call this weekend.
I'll give you a moment for the feelings of disbelief and outrage to subside.
Okay, so this on call isn't so bad, actually. I get paid for four work hours plus 15 minutes for every call I take. Also, I have an hour to respond to any issue, so I don't have to be chained to my laptop, and I'm only on call from 9AM-4PM Saturday and Sunday. Still, the specter of discover-e-style life-sucking on-calledness looms...I feel a wee bit stressed about it.
I said at Christmas that one of the things that frustrates me so much (philosophically) about my company is that they charge so much for child care but they pay the actual child care providers so little. The other day it occurred to me (or someone pointed it out to me, I can't remember) that one of the reasons they do this is so they can pay my very generous salary. Does it follow then, that I am part of the problem? By pushing my boss to pay me more money, am I somewhere down the line causing there to be less money available for the child care providers? I know it's not as simple as all that, but it does make me wonder. If nothing else, it's the perfect illustration of the problem I have with corporate child care. What's more important to my company, the people who fix the computers or the people who actually interact with the children? Seems pretty clear where their priorities are.
This realization also makes me think about why I work where I work, and in this field. I mean, am I really helping anybody? Does it really matter that I answer the phone and tell them to reboot and now whatever they were trying to do before is working? For the longest time I have stuck with this field because the money was necessary to support my "lifestyle" (whatever you make of that), but lately since I've been on my own and scaling back on my bills, I've been wondering, just how much money do I actually need to live happily? Could I take a pay cut to do something I actually enjoy or that really makes a difference? The matter requires more thought, to be sure. It would be nice to enjoy going to work. Not necessarily every day, but maybe once in a while I could not dread getting out of bed. That would be cool.
4 comments:
Carrie--I'm not even sure for whom you work these days, but if it's a big enough corporation, their one-at-a-time humanist concerns must take a back seat because, as they get more customers, they're reduced to trying to please as many people as possible as much of the time as possible. But unless they're a one-on-one service provider, they can't please all of the people all of the time. With a large enough customer base, the driving force of the corporation becomes simple supply and demand.
In other words, though The Company may WANT to provide better-paid child care for all its employees, they're not in the business of providing child care at ALL; they're in the business of (evidently) telling people to reboot their computers, or whatever. THAT is their primary business, and they have to take care of that first, and they have to do it well, or they won't have any customers to pay them and they won't have any employees with child care needs.
To carry this logic a little further, supply and demand would be why you're worth more than the child care people. Humans are pre-wired to care for little humans, and children are mostly self-correcting mechanisms anyway. (If they fall down, they can get up without help, and so forth.) So taking care of children is relatively low-involvement, and there's no shortage of people who are capable. Hence it's a low-cost item. In contrast, adults like to think that they understand how the world works, so they're not as self-correcting as the little ones. (They SHOULD be, but they're not.) And understanding OS'es is more specialized than understanding child care. So even though telling people to reboot involves no more actual work than telling children to get up and try again, your skill set is different and your audience needs more attention and reassurance. Hence the justification for bigger bucks.
That's my two cents, anyway.
Love,
Uncle Joe
I agree with Joe. Especially on that last part. Not only that. When going into the teaching business, teachers know what they are getting into. They are going into low paying jobs to do something they love. This ties into what you are thinking. If you want to do something that you love. You might not love every aspect of it, but still love it as a whole. Enlightening young minds is very rewarding to some people, just as enlightening people on how to balance a family and do their job correctly is rewarding to others :)
Good luck on your quest, and the oncall.
sound points from uncle joe. huge company, profit motive etc. you're not selling toxic chemicals or happy meals or some other putreficating body to an unsuspecting innocent public so you can sleep easy. as to the deeper question of 'does this make a difference', the way you conduct yourself and live your life provides the meaning. at least until you don't need to work any more :)
xo
Well first of all, I want to thank you all for your thoughtful commentary. It's nice to know that someone out there is listening. Now, my response:
I work for a child care company, so I would hope that they are actually in the business of providing child care. My issue isn't with my company in particular, it's with the idea of corporate child care in general. As a corporation, my company should be focused on the bottom line and making a profit for its shareholders, and if the way they do that is to follow market trends for IT and child care providers' salaries, then so be it. I tend to feel, though, that corporations really shouldn't be involved in child care, just like they shouldn't be involved in health care, pet care, education, or anything else where doing what's right for the beings involved would potentially conflict with making a profit.
So my personal conflict comes from thinking that maybe the company I work for shouldn't be in the business it's in and by working here I am participating in something I don't agree with. I'm also making a lot more money than the child care providers because of the way the market is, so in a way I'm benefiting from a situation that I am against. I'm not self-important enough to think that simply quitting my job will change anything (except for my income and employment status), but to an extent it definitely does bother me to participate in and benefit from something I disagree with. Add to that my general dissatisfaction with tech support (which is nothing new if you know me very well) and I find myself thinking about other options for employment.
Post a Comment