Five years ago, I started at $19 an hour, but now I make $35.44 an hour on the majority of my shifts (second shift and weekends. I also get automatic time-and-a-half all day on Sunday, which is a 12 hour shift that frequently runs long because no senior techs log on Sunday night to relieve me, so that's 12+ hours @ $53.16 to start my week.) My raise and promotion to senior engineer should be coming through now that overtime is gone, but at this point, I'll believe it when I see it.
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Here's my 2018 return straight out of Turbotax, with my mother as a dependent. She died that year and I haven't filed for 2019 yet, because I currently owe a shitload of money until I contribute to an IRA and my HSA, so 2018 is what they based my #trumpbux on.
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I feel like I'm smart; I took practically every hour of overtime, every holiday shift, and every special project that was available until the unlimited overtime spigot finally got turned off when LUNGAIDS hit, and was playing WoW most of the time in between MIM bridges and during the boring parts of said bridges.
The lower tier techs on my shift could have taken the overtime instead, but they all refused to do it 95% of the time, which is how it ended up going to me. Now said coworkers are having to choose between food and rent, while I have a paid-off house, a paid-off car, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank that I don't even know what to do with.
But there's truth to the second part; I definitely work a lot because I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my time. As for social interaction, the customers I work with are generally all at the senior levels of IT/telecom for Fortune 500 companies, large public safety systems, or large government entities. These people know their shit and are generally pretty nice people to interact with. It's not like I'm working at Centurylink or Granite and dealing with Joe Fucktard who can't figure out how to reboot his cable modem. I probably work at one of the few jobs where the customers are far more intelligent and pleasant than the coworkers.