Dream Job Turned Sour
I was coming into a job that I was overqualified for, but I took it for the same salary as my last job because I hated my previous job and wanted an out. Plus, I really liked what the company did—it was in the railroad industry, my dream come true.
They also said they couldn’t offer me more on the salary and claimed it was already more than what they could offer. So, fine. I was the IT guy for HR, and one day about seven months in, they asked me to pull a list of everyone who had left the HR department in the last year.
The list consisted of only three people, one of whom was my predecessor. When I pulled the information from their database, I made a blood-boiling discovery. See, some of the information included his salary.
They had been paying my predecessor, who was less qualified than I was, $20K a year more than myself. I was also driving over 90 minutes to and from work every day for this job because it was a dream of mine to work in the railroading industry.
I had a new job within a few weeks, only a half-hour away from my home, and it came with a raise.