Like I said, I got a pay raise to scrub toilets lol. That was in a power plant. Because that got my foot in the door there, I got an opportunity to get into traveling for refueling outages as a radiological decontamination technician at nuclear plants. That was mostly Swiffer sweeping floors, wiping stuff down, and taking out the trash, but one of the projects was hanging heavy lead blankets in high rad areas while wearing uncomfortable, hot suits with a PAPR to breathe through. From there I got into water chemistry as a service rep to treat the circulating water system at a nuclear plant and also visited a few other plants. This was about double my toilet scrubbing pay. One of the other plants was hiring a few years in when I was looking for greener pastures, so I got in as an outside operator. After almost two years of that, earlier this year I was promoted to operate the water treatment plant onsite. That's at double my water chemistry service rep pay.

It took time, hard work, and a ton of luck, but I'd probably be dead by now if I hadn't made that change. I'm glad you're still enjoying being a chef and I'm not gonna shit on anybody's dreams, but I found it to be a thankless job. Maybe you have more freedom and better help. I was doing 60-70 busy hours every week and I don't think I ever got more than $12/hour, maybe only $11.50? Plus no benefits. Now I'm at $50/hour (and scheduled overtime) plus good (not great) benefits. The drawback is that it's rotating 12 hour shift work, so I'll do a set of day shift 0500-1700 and then have time off and flip to night shift 1700-0500 back and forth. But every 4 weeks I get 7 days off in a row. It requires pretty good knowledge and application of physics and chemistry, but only requires a high school diploma for some reason. Also, I'm in the US, so I'm sure the numbers and everything look very different elsewhere.