Wait..you get overtime?? I need to talk to my boss about this. I'm only allowed comp time! On the plus side, I have enough time to take off for about the next month or so. Of course, I'm also a lowly GS 9. Now I just need some of those GS11 folks to retire.
Count your blessings in this economy.
For many years, people considered those completely unqualified only suitable for civil service thus people thinking that GS-9 is "lowly". No GS job is lowly, it means you are employed!
Equal jobs in the private industry have far less stability and don't pay much more these days than civil service. In some areas, the highest paid jobs in certain disciplines are those of government service. Many people in San Jose/SF ditched their temporary government service jobs (feds, state, city) to pursue their fortunes in dot.com. Those who stayed behind felt bad, initially, for not going for it, but today, the ones with jobs are the civil servants.
People today have a profoundly different view of jobs people once laughed at (retail, civil service, home health care) but today nobody is working for high tech firms or mortgage giants who hand you a Mercedes as a company car or give you bonuses several times one's salary. One company I know, in networking who is no longer in business, once paid their linemen $250 dollars cash every day, each, for lunch money. A rival company gave one of their regular techies a $25,000 dollar single season box seat for the Giants knowing they didn't give a darn about baseball. Some of these technicians, programmers, engineers, and MBAs flaunted their money and looked down on others. People headed to dot.com, while they were still students, talked more about the Italian sports cars they had picked out before they even got out of tech school or college. Those days are long gone. Many who thought this windfall would last forever bought tinderbox fixer-uppers for a million(s) dollars because it was in Santa Clara County. They thought they could afford high end five digit monthly mortgages. People bought cars worth more than houses are today thinking they could make the payments for several years, easy. Rockport walkers gave way to Manolos. Parents thought their ordinary kids could go to high end private schools and this alone would give them a ticket to the Ivy League. A lot of stupid spending pretty much defined the Valley.
In the end, the tortoise won the race.
