Could one trademark the human breathing sound in the US?

That would make quite the lawsuit of the century...

Now you guys owe me a cent/day each or stop breathing (TM) now!

Well I can't say that I didn't see this coming since during an interview at IBM in Poland I was told by the head of a department that they will be recruiting at least a 100 new employees this year just in the Krakow office.

Already the currency makes a difference and adding the fact that IBM is known to be very cheap in pay here makes a great savings plan..

It is sometimes more of a timing thing moving up the ladder, sometimes there simply aren't any open positions for tier 2 or 3 support, even though you are qualified.

I work for a Fortune 100 company in Europe and we do make a salary which is way above the national average (Yes, in tier 1 production support!), but it is really hard to slide in to a higher level support team. After working here over a year, I do agree that it is time to move on, but at the same time it's hard to find a job meeting my requirements (not always the employers').

Moreover, this job leaves me a lot of free time to do my own projects like designing websites, which together at the end of the month make you one hell of a happy camper.

So sometimes it really is hard to make up your mind.. move on with a career and make less?

A second thought.. I agree that tier 1 support most of the time is useless (try calling your ISP), but it is not always the case. I'm really tired of people laughing at what we do. i wish one of our tier 3 support analysts would try to do our job for a week, hell, even for a day. They wouldn't last, believe me. You need broad knowledge needed to troubleshoot systems from SAP, mainframes, as400, and so on( in the case of my tier 1 support). And in some cases we get fatter paychecks than tier 3 (yes, really).