Promotion

I am reading an excellent novel by Robert Harris called "Imperium". It is about the great Roman orator and stateman named Cicero. This short passage, when Cicero decides to take on the powers that be and go for broke so to speak, took me back to my first teaching post: "Yesterday has taught me a lesson. Let us say I wait a year or two, hanging on Pompey's every word in the hope of favour, running errands for him. We have all seen men like that in the senate - growing older, waiting for half-promises to be fulfilled. They are hollowed out by it. And before they even know it, their moment has passed and they have nothing left with which to bargain."
Yes, it took me back to a meeting I had, in the corridor of the school I had been at for two years and which I pondered leaving, with the deputy head. He said: "In about 10 years time J.G., head of physics, will be retiring and you can slip into that post." I stood there and to anyone seeing me I probably gave the impression of someone actually considering the "offer"; but underneath that veneer of pleasant approbation of the idea was the real me thinking "d'you think I'm going to stay in this bloody hell hole for another ten bloody awful years and then find that someone else has been appointed instead of me?"
I left soon after and got a much better job, more pay too. A sort of promotion.
I have seen too many who, as Cicero explains, waited and waited hoping against hope that the next job they have been half-promised will give them the promotion they feel they deserve only to find their hopes dashed when they are told something like "Well, of course, I did my best for you but....."