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Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

I work with customer service reps on a daily basis. Their work ethic is vastly different depending on the person.

Some customer service reps should be able to afford a house, while others probably shouldn't.

> I tried gently broaching the topic with my friends once. One friend who is a low level customer service rep that never attended college responded "I have a job, you have a job. We work the same amount [we don't]. Why are you able to afford to buy a house, and I can't?"

And what insights did you garner from that interaction aside from your thinly veiled sense of superiority?

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You can be the best customer service rep in the world. It's not gonna make you enough to buy a house in my neighborhood no matter how much you wish for equality (unless you adopt a rather extreme saving lifestyle, which my friend has not).

It's facts, not superiority.

He works 8 hours a day and sometimes complains that a customer cursed at him.

I work 12 hour days (and I'm on call the other 12 when I'm not sleeping) 6 days a week. I go to sleep and wake up thinking about my work. Am I a workaholic? Yes. Do I love my job? Yes.

My takeaway was that most people don't realize that a typical 9-5 low level job is no longer gonna cut it if you want to live a certain lifestyle.

I don't consider myself superior to my friends; I just made better choices than them.

The customer service rep, for example, had every opportunity to go to college. His reasoning for not going was (and I quote), "I don't need to go to college to learn some nerdy shiz. Let's talk in 10 years when I'm managing a customer service floor, and you're talking geek to a computer."

We're closing in on 10 years now. I'm not gonna remind him.

> My takeaway was that most people don't realize that a typical 9-5 low level job is no longer gonna cut it if you want to live a certain lifestyle.

Being able to afford housing with a 9-5 job is a luxury now?

> I work 12 hour days (and I'm on call the other 12 when I'm not sleeping) 6 days a week. I go to sleep and wake up thinking about my work. Am I a workaholic? Yes. Do I love my job? Yes.

What's the point of writing that on the internet? Do you believe policy should be structured around people like you? Do you believe people who don't work 12 hours shouldn't be able to afford to buy a house?

> I don't consider myself superior to my friends; I just made better choices than them.

Yes, you do. It's in everything you write. You were able to make better choices because your circumstances allowed it. If you were their actual friend you'd probably have half a clue why they didn't make the exact choices you did.

> We're closing in on 10 years now. I'm not gonna remind him.

You're just being an asshole on the internet now. Everyone needs an outlet, I guess.

What you seem to be missing in every single response you've given is that I'm referring to buying a house in the NYC area.

As the article says, they can move to where a house costs $120,000. But they insist on wanting to live in NYC.

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