Honest job post

WPC Plant Shit Supervisor

While most jobs involve a fairly large amount of shit, this is the first one I've seen that comes right out and puts it in the name.

the cold, yes, that one

I have "the cold" again. I fought with this thing all god damned Fall it feels like and finally, while I was totally unemployed with no interviews or even good looking jobs to apply to, I was not sick with it.

Now, this week, I have two interviews. One is a job that I really really (really) want. And last week, I got "the cold" again. Today, I woke up 3 hours before my first interview (at the job I don't really really want but can't afford not to interview for) drenched in sweat and feeling like someone filed all around the insides of my trachea and pharynx. "The cold" is not your typically stuffy head blurg thing, it's unique in that it is, more than anything else, quite painful. I can hide a fairly large amount of pain for short times, however, the cold - since it is a cold - includes sniffles and gurgles and coughing. This makes it harder to hide. My instinct when sick is to not go out, thus there is no need to hide anything. But man, I NEED a job.

Since developing a few chronic health problems, I find that I have a sort of smoldering resentment for people who bring their nasty cold out in public for all of us to share in. Sure, some of them might be in a crappy position - no sick time or some other compelling reason (like desperately needed job interviews) to be out and about showering the populace with noxious bacteria, mycoplasms, or viruses. But I know there are people out there who just get up and go with their cold for really no good reason whatsoever. Explicitly, I doubt they give a second thought to it. Implicitly, I suspect these people are waiting to get an award for perfect attendance.

E.g., yesterday, I was at the public library checking out a new (for me) book. There were quite a few people there including a woman with two kids. The woman wrapped up at the check out desk and after standing around looking blank for a few seconds, the kids started to move on to follow her to the exit. The boy paused though then turned to face the rest of us waiting in line and let loose several big coughs at us.

Not only did he fail to cover his mouth, I saw that there was no evidence at all of even a half hearted attempt to appear to cover it. You know, the slightly raised arm or hand that doesn't make it to the face but that comes up nearly reflexively in someone who was at least taught manners. When I see this shit, it's all I can do to not say something. The only thing that stops me is that I am well aware of the weird social approach we as a society have to illness and sick behavior and I know that in this context, I'd be the nutjob who is "paranoid" about germs while they'd be the normal people who don't let being sick stop or even slow them down enough to cover their fucking mouths.

I emailed my first interviewer this morning to let him know I had the cold, tell him I was still interested in interviewing today, but offered to reschedule if he didn't want to share in my cold. This is not a move I was happy to be making (as I said above, I know my views on public health and cold sharing are minority at best) but truly, I cannot go sit in what will probably be a small room with someone for what will probably be at least 45 minutes and quite likely share this wretched thing with him. Sure, odds are he's one of the masses of idiots who march around sick waiting for the perfect attendance medal. But what if he's HIV positive or otherwise immunocompromised? What if he has a spouse, kid, or parent he cares for who is on chemotherapy? What if like me, he just had some really important things to do this week, things that could affect his life in a very significant way?

searching

On with the job search. My temp position has ended, both blessing and curse. Really it's more of a curse but with a bright side. The bright side is of course that the people I worked for/with were the sort who can't get the hell out of their own way. K-cop and her buddy, Queen B (with all that B stands for) were chronic thorns in my side. They were each causes and embodiments of much that was wrong culturally with that office, however I can't say the "big boss lady" didn't hold some responsibility in the mess that was the office climate and overall philosophy of "let's just assume everything will go according to plan". I don't get that mentality. It doesn't fit with my own experiences in any domain and I can't imagine running an office like that. Sure, sometimes you can't cover all the bases. It might be impractical or impossible. Time constraints, personnel allocation, and budget may conspire against preparing for possible outcomes. And some shit is just straight up unpredictable. However, at this past job I witnessed some seriously blatant head in the sand, grossly shortsighted behaviors which left me simply stunned and left everyone scrambling when the shit inevitably hit the fan.

And so I am somewhat happy to be done there. I am very unhappy to be unemployed though. Another day on the internet, surfing the job boards and updating my online resumes and candidate info sites (think PeopleSoft but worse). I just rewrote a cover letter, my entire resume, and revised my work experiences on this god awful hosting site called Taleo. Holy crap that thing was a pain in the ass....speaking of the link between poor business culture poor business practice, it seems Taleo sucks in ways beyond my limited job seeking perspective.

While I am off and in need of projects, I've decided to look for cat food alternatives for my cat Max. Max has IBD, probably some food intolerances. For some time now, he's been on a limited ingredient/novel protein diet. We had him on Hill's prescription diet D/D, rabbit, venison, and duck. He tends to eat only one kind, then after some time, he refuses it and we need to switch to a different flavor. A few years ago now, he stopped eating the D/D altogether so at the advice of our vet, we switched him to Royal Canin's limited ingredient/novel protein diet. He ate that happily for a while and with less good (but still not horrible) digestive results than with the Hill's. Then he started getting bad in terms of digestive symptoms (as a friend calls it, "Pandora's Cat Box") and also constitutional symptoms. We took him to the vet and he had some funny blood chemistry values. So back to Hill's, which he ate as if it were new and which agreed with him better. But now he's refusing the Hill's again to the point where he's losing weight. He's hungry, he wants food, but not that food apparently.

We have been punting with just feeding him meats he can eat "au jus", mostly consisting of shredded pork with water and fish oil since he has a demonstrable intolerance to chicken, turkey, and beef. But this is not going to give him the nutrients he needs, moveover, he's still losing weight. I took some time on Monday and Tuesday to research cat food that meets the following criteria:
Has no chicken, turkey, or beef
Has no glutten/wheat or corn products

The first we tried was California Natural salmon and sweet potato. This was a bit of a risk since I suspect the cat doesn't do well with salmon. However, it wasn't clear if his past salmon problems were a result of salmon alone, salmon in combination, or were simply due to some other product in the salmon based food he'd eaten in the past. Yeah, well, turns out that salmon is apparently a definite part of the problem. So no more of that. This morning we are on to Nature's Variety Instinct for cats. The one I've selected is Lamb. It's in no way a limited ingredient formula, nor does it have a single source of protein, however it has none of the items I know or strongly suspect Max to have an intolerance to.

So far, he's had most of a can and not pooped it all out. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one.

catty

Cat's out of the bag I guess. So Kindergarten teacher, or rather Kindergarten Cop, has been working my nerve with what should properly be described as her ladylike behavior. Oh what, did you think only socially dysfunctional stereotypically masculine behavior pissed me off? How wrong you were.

There's a certain set of feminine behaviors, affectations, styles, thought processes, and yes fashion, that puts me right over the edge. Although usually it's the one specific detail which I fixate on in my rants, it is NEVER just that one thing. Take Kindergarten Cop's shirt (please). The shirt is one (very) bright beacon in the sea of kCop's appallingly screwy femininity. In most of her behaviors, as with the shirt, I can see the kernel of cause and I understand it - sort of. That is, I understand as in I comprehend. I do not, as the hippies would say, "dig" kCop's causes. When wrung through kCop's filter of fem, these causes have some unfortunate behavioral outcomes. E.g. wanting to enjoy what is an enjoyable season (Fall) + wanting to put on a positive face for work (despite some shit in the private life, not speculating here, she shared a lot on day one of the job) --> [fem] --> that crazy get up.

Shirts and such are easily recognized symbols. Easy to put your finger on, so to speak. The other less physical ones such as elements of a person's management style are not necessarily so quickly recognizable, especially when your interactions in the presence of that person are limited to ones in which you are an active participant. When that is the case, it's hard (and I'd say somewhat cumbersome) to be both fully participating and carefully observing. But sometimes you are blessed with a few moments of dissociation in the confines of the discourse and you can sort of watch and talk at the same time.

I had one of those moments yesterday, a peek at what's behind the dayglow orange/yellow curtain. I am less than thrilled at what I saw.

This kind of explicit awareness is going to make working with kCop much harder, at least short term. Maybe given a few days to process this, I will be able to temper my reaction to the freak show which is my coworker but for now I'm going to have to blog, etc., to work out the utter horror she elictis in me.

workin

So I have this job, this temp job. It's ok. You know it's not a great job when one of the things you tell yourself to get through the day is "I'm just a temp". Honestly, I think there'd be more to like if I were not just a temp. For starters, I'd be compensated better and boy there's a lot I can tolerate if I'm being paid to tolerate it. As it is, my current compensation is just barely enough and thus the consolation of being "just a temp".

On the plus side, one of my coworker's recently remarked, at least I'll have payroll experience now. I have nicknamed this coworker "the kindergarten teacher". The nickname has been coming for some time but was cemented by an outfit she wore last week which featured a turtle neck shirt the color of that crayon you are never sure whether to call orange or yellow.

Yeah, that's catty. Ok so add being clandestinely catty to my list of things I do to get through my day.

happy birthday

Hey, it's my birthday! Seeing as I'm working as a temp and I've only been there for 5 days now, I think it will be a fairly anonymous birthday out of the house unless I call my friends on campus and announce it. And that's kind of, eh. Most of my good friends from campus are hardly ever on campus anymore and I'm not in the mood to round up a half hearted not well known posse of birthday support. I have been assured that I will be made a nice dinner and given chocolatey cake when I get home though. This is good. And tomorrow's Friday, which means one whole week of fulltime work under my belt. Also good.

I'm no stranger to the "new kid" birthday phenomenon. In primary school, there were many years when I had some well intentioned teacher who would organize a birthday calendar or board but by the time they were able to get around to it, all of us September kids' birthdays had passed. On my 18th birthday, I had my first day (post orientation) at my first remotely adult job as a unit secretary on a surgical inpatient unit, then I went home to my dorm where birthdays hadn't even come up yet (the kids were still quite absorbed in that heady early period where they engage in flirtatious/competitive comparisons of SAT scores, class rankings, high school social inventories, and stories about trips overseas).

Who else has this birthday?
Bell Hooks
Shel Silverstein
Barbara Walters
William Faulkner
Also, Will Smith, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Christopher Reeve, and Heather Locklear.


* = I'm not age-phobic. Everyone who lives long enough to get old will live long enough for their bodies to let them down in the most primal ways - e.g., no taking for granted that you can move yourself around with or without assistance. Mine body has already started and so I have had a preview of this process. In case you were wondering, yes, it sucks.

jitters!

I got a job! It's a temp job working at my (former) university as an administrative assistant and it starts tomorrow. Yikes! I'm happy but I'm freaking out because I have, as usual, work jitters.
What if they think I know how to do all sorts of Excel magic?
What if they give me all this shit to do and I have NO IDEA how to do it and they're like "PFG is a moron, what the hell did we hire her for?"

On the plus side, I'm starting on a Friday which means even if it SUCKS, I have the weekend to regroup. Wish me good, productive thoughts.

married, etc.

Hey I got married yesterday! I gotta say, small and casual is definitely the way to go. My siblings were down, A____'s siblings (some) were up. We had the ceremony here in our apartment (and Skyped to some of A____'s out of state family), then we went out for chinese food. It was much lower stress than the big frufru wedding and really nice - even with scorpion bowl/zombie induced mayhem (we think all that differentiates a scorpion bowl from a zombie is whether the shitload of rum and "fruit juices" are served in bowls or a tiki cups...yes BW, there were tiki cups!). I'll post pix later. Now I'm off to bed so I can get up early tomorrow because I have TWO job interviews tomorrow! I'm cautiously excited. Man I hope I get one of these jobs. That would be a super nice wedding present.

not on crazy pills

I was just doing a little research on the US and CT legislative candidates. I ran across this gem from US Rep Joe Courtney (D, district 2):
(from 2nd District Race: Candidates for Congress address high fuel prices, By Adam Bowles, The Norwich Bulletin, Aug 24, 2008)

Locally, Courtney insisted the state take a fresh look at how it retains its younger workers, calling the current thinking in Hartford "reactive" at best.
“Other states are more predatory when it comes to growing their job bases," he said. “If you take a look around, there’s not much available (in Connecticut) when it comes to entry-level jobs...”

Ok so I'm not crazy.

Also, if you're eligible to vote in the upcoming US election (not to mention any possible state primaries between now and then), please check out Project Vote Smart for information about candidates who will be on your ballot.

If you already know what US and state legislative districts you live in you can access candidate information in the following way:
From the link/navigation bar near the top of Vote Smart's site frame, select the header "Candidates" and you'll get a drop down menu which includes the items "US Congress" and "State Offices".
Here's what you get if you select US Congress and then Massachusetts.
And this links to the results for State Offices, Massachusetts, Senate.

If you don't know your US and state district info and if you're not in the mood to track it down via internet search of phone call to your town clerk/city hall, I suggest you use your zip code to zero in on your candidates on Vote Smart. Here's what to do:
You'll need your full zip+4, which you can find here. Once you have your zip+4, type/paste it into the field on the upper left side of Vote Smart's site frame titled "Find Your Representatives - Search by Candidate's or Official's Last Name, or Enter Your ZIP Code". This takes you to a page which allows you to navigate to all your area's candidates for state or federal office.

Worst job?

Job searching has me thinking a lot about what I want in a job - not that I'm in much of a position to be choosy. This line of thought is more or less an obsessive stream I go through after sending an application in somewhere. It starts with "God I hope I get something" then, depending on the job, moves through "but really, I don't know if I want that job..." Because it's far away, or working under a person I already know and already know to be unstable and prone to crankiness. Or it's working for too little money. Or it's too few hours. Or it's in insurance.

So I've been thinking about what I do want in a job. More on that later. For now, worst jobs. I want to hear from you about what was the worst job you ever had, and why. Mine was working at a hallmark store in my home town the summer I finished high school. Really, it was for about 3 weeks, if that, at the beginning of the summer I finished high school. I applied hoping I'd get to work in back a lot. This was back in the days of typewriters and handwriting, the accoutrement for which I found endlessly fascinating (much as I like hardware stores and lamp shops).

Alas, no, I did not ever get to work in back with the stacks of linen stationery or crisp typewriter paper. I was exiled to the front of the store which was pretty much what you usually see in hallmark stores these days. Cards - lots of cards, but also figurines, small stuffed animals, and various doodads, thingies, and whatzits themed for festive/ornamental/quasi-religious (these days you can add spiritual, but not then and not there) intent. What got me worst was the figurines. And June. June was the older woman who ran the front. This was silly as there were, as far as I could tell, only two employees. Mike, the guy who hired me and who inhabited the cool side of the store and June, who glided through the front noticing every stray hair or smidge of dust on the floor to ceiling mirrored shelves that supported many nurseries worth of creepy snow babies and at least an entire village of apple cheeked hummels. June did not like me. I did not like snow babies. Also, I have this problem with being surrounded by breakable things on breakable surfaces. We don't mix. My brother and I firmly established this first in our youth (we took down mannequins and knocked over rickety tables covered in merchandise). We were nearly ejected from the Urban Outfitters in Ann Arbor after an "incident" in the hipster homewear section.

At the hallmark store, my job was to dust.

I hated being there. It was not bad in an overt and evil way, it was just this low level WTF feeling all the time. Kind of like a David Lynch shot of an otherwise normal room. There's just something wrong, you know? June's attitude was 100% frosty, whether she was speaking to me or not and I was still very, very ego centric and overly self conscious thus I interpreted all of June's frost as a seething hatred of my very being. I tried really hard though, obsessed over straightening the cards, going very slowly so I could avoid the figurine shelves. We had approximately one customer every two hours, so getting "stuck" on register wasn't even a remote option. Each day came down to this passive aggressive war between me and June, played out on the figurines and cards. I'd straighten, then reorganize, then straighten some more. I'm sure my face was a picture of adolescent panic whenever June would approach me with a dust rag and a bottle of glass cleaner.

Eventually, I was called into the back among the carbon paper and tracing pads and let go. I don't even remember the reason Mike gave, not that he needed one, but he was polite enough that I'm sure he offered something. I was too lost to notice and feeling heady with my impending freedom. My mother's insistence that I have a job for the whole two months between the end of high school and the start of college was why I had this shitty job in the first place. Getting fired was the perfect out.

I know this is far from horrible. I've asked this question at parties (btw, a nice "chit chat" conversation and you get to find out some really interesting things about people, their experiences, but more importantly their attitudes) and heard some truly terrifying, gross, shocking, outrageous, and otherwise just plain awful examples. There are a lot of ways a job can suck. So what's yours? Worst job, or at least bad.

Teeth, etc.

I had a dream last night that my tooth was falling out. And lo, I woke at 3:40 AM and my tooth hurt like crazy. As I fumbled with NSAIDs and light switches, I recalled my dentist saying something about a root canal the last few times I saw her. Now which tooth was it that was a ticking time bomb of expensive fuckery, I thought. Was this the one? Maybe. I didn't and still don't remember. The whole pain and scraping and drilling thing has a way of driving details like which tooth might be in for even more of that right out of my head.

I got some some semi-good news today. Actually, I just got news, mixed news, but I'm so desperate for any good I'm happy with the mix in today's bag o'news instead of a bag full of uniformly shitty shit. The shitty news was that I didn't get chosen for an interview for the job that the temp agency sent my resume in for last week (which I had sort of figured on account of not hearing anything after Thursday when they called to tell me they sent it in). The good (comparatively) news is that there are two other jobs now and the agency sent my resume in for both of those.
yay
Ok, so I'm not doing backflips over this news but at least I'm not feeling as totally depressed as I would have if all today's news entailed was a confirmation that I was passed over for another interview. All your good wishes and good job karma/juju and whatnot are appreciated.

License, etc

A____ and I applied for our marriage license today. It's officially down on paper and stuff. A friend who is a justice of the peace is officiating and the venue? TBA (tbd, actually...gotta pick a wall of my apartment to get married in front of).

Also, did I mention I really need a job?! Still nothing. Man, this is starting to make me feel like a total loser...

Friday

See I can do that because I skipped Friday last week.

Many people talking politics, presidential politics that is. I follow politics, not so much as an enthusiast but as er, a citizen I guess. My level of interest never struck me as odd until I moved out of Massachusetts. How people in other places I've lived are during presidential campaigns is how most people around where I grew up are in general. At least in my personal experience. Possibly this has influenced my take on voter empowerment. See, I think that presidential campaigns (and elections) are to a truly democratic governmental process as Brittney Spears is to music.

This observation has ripened as I age. As I get older, I find the furor around presidential campaigns has become a bit more irritating. Of course the last eight years have amply demonstrated the kind of hell a president can bring down upon a nation. This shows up most especially with presidential appointments. Consider just Gonzalez and Ashcroft for some excellent cases in point. But with the exception of talk of supreme court nominations, we don't hear much about that in the mainstream big ticket item news. I.e., if not talk of specific picks, then what kind of climate and policies do the candidates believe will be appropriate and right in their FCC, their SEC, their FDA, their Justice Department, their Health and Human Services? How would Hilary Clinton's EEOC and Labor Relations Board picks have differed from Barack Obama's?
Etc.

Since I've been unemployed, I've been in a bit of a bubble. I don't get out much on account of my laying around and eating bon-bons, watching my "stories" and scouring job postings oh about 5 times a day. But today, I was on campus primarily to deal with an amazingly screwball fuckup from payroll (someone accidentally changed my name in a database that communicated with my insurance companies to reflect a mutated form of my (former) married name, the equivalent of which would be a change to PEG-S instead of just plain old legal PFG). For most of the day, I managed to not speak too much to anyone. I scared a grad student who stumbled into the lab where I was trying to troubleshoot a program for my former advisor. I bumped into a former co-worker and plied her for information about possible job leads. But no politics. And then, just when A___ and I were getting ready to leave, we ended up chatting with A___'s office mate R___. R____ was all atwitter about the campaign - specifically the news about McCain's choice of running mate.

"Well I read that she's got the Tina Fey vote tied up" he said. "Huh?" "Because she looks like her...you know?" he said. I think this was supposed to be ironic. "Oh, yeah I saw her. I kind of thought more Julia what's her name, the one from Seinfeld." R____ went on to discuss her record a bit too and give me his analysis on the reasons why McCain picked her. I said I felt McCain and Obama both choose people who seemed to have the aura of just the other side of the center. McCain picked a woman (to show he's a stand up guy who the ladies don't hate for having let rip a stray rape joke) and Obama picked Whitey McWhiterson. I know, I read Biden's bio. But when it comes to presidential elections, it's a show. And for democratic mainstream and a safe, nice, clean articulate white guy who makes the less than liberal center folks feel like everything is in "good hands", I think Biden is the man, so to speak. "Well, there's Dodd too. He's really fucking white." A___ quipped. Yes, Dodd. But Dodd's a dud. He's from CT (ew) and he's recently had some bad press, at least locally, involving special mortgage deals. Anyhow, I said all that and R___ told me that he likes Biden and then went on to say why. I feel like a jaded churl when I hear him discuss Biden as anything other than a PR device which panders to a low and likely racist electorate, but I can't help how I feel.

However, that is the point. It's how I FEEL, not how I think. How I think would reflect research on the potential Vice President picks and since I am just not that enchanted with presidential campaigns, I haven't brought myself to do that research. And without doing the digging, I'll never get real info. I'm certainly not going to get it from the tickerworthy news stories like this one, which was ambitiously titled "Obama says he'll 'fix broken politics'. "Oooh," I thought. "What's he gonna do?" because I really am a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington kind of gal. Term limits? Campaign finance reform? Ethics regulations? What might he be proposing to fix broken politics? I read on. And on. I got near the end still waiting for that crucial bit of information, but knowing who the entertainers were at the convention (Jennifer Hudson (who the fuck is she?) and will.i.am (?)).

Anyhow, because this is how I FEEL and not how I think, I've decided I am just not in the mood to engage in political bullshitting about this particular aspect of the upcoming election. I think instead my full attention would be better spent on the other races and issues that will be decided in the upcoming election. E.g.
The U.S. Senate...
Elections for the United States Senate will be held on November 4, 2008, with 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate being contested. Thirty-three seats are regular elections; the winners will be eligible to serve six-year terms from January 3, 2009 until January 3, 2015 as members of Senate Class II. There are also two special elections: one in Wyoming and another in Mississippi; the winners will serve the remainder of terms that expire on January 3, 2013, as members of Senate Class I.
And the U.S. House of Representatives...
The 2008 U.S. House of Representatives elections will be held on November 4, 2008, to elect members to the United States House of Representatives to serve in the 111th United States Congress from January 3, 2009 until January 3, 2011. All 435 seats are up for election. Democrats, who regained a majority in the 2006 elections hope to retain or expand their control of Congress.

Also, we have state legislative elections this year as well. How important are those? Consider same sex marriage in Massachusetts. An amendment to the Massachusetts' state constitution was proposed which would have defined marriage "only as the union of one man and one woman." The first vote by the state legislature involved a majority against it (yay), but still enough support (61 votes for) for the amendment to warrant another vote in the next legislative session (boo). The next vote resulted in only 45 for the amendment (yay). The required number of votes to pass it was 50 (yikes! just five votes from banning same sex marriage? Holy shit!).

So again, how important is your state legislative election? Rather, I'd say. And yet the news coverage is buried if present at all and the interest is low. My god, am I the only person who remembers Newt Gingrich?

So...(I say that a lot, how about "thus"?)
Thus, while I certainly do believe who the next president and vice president and presidential cabinet and federal executive appointments will be is terribly important, I can't help THINKING when I hear people around me all riled up and wanting to gab about the latest media mangled presidential campaign PR/news that they are sort of johnnie come latelies to the realities of their power as members of an electorate. And I am just not going to be a part of that bullshit. I care, I really do, but I'm not going to let that concern divert my attentions into what is a essentially side show extravaganza. I know the political icons are the elephant and donkey, but I THINK that perhaps at this point they should retire those fellows and replace them with the dog and pony.

job posting of the day

Retail Sales Opportunities in Women's Lingerie at Nordstrom

Tuesdelightful

I'm taking a break from the job search bonanza that is my life these days. This morning's highlights included applying for one more low paying clerical position at a place which has already discarded two of my applications for being "overqualified" and "not best fit". Excellent. Also, I rearranged my resume so that the job titles appear before places of employment and modified descriptions and skills to fit HR jobs.

Wow. How's that for fun?

I opted to take a few moments away from this laugh-a-minute romp that is my job search to attend to the serious work of stream of consciousness internet surfing. Here's today's catch.
Addictionary, or more specifically The Political Addictionary.
What is The Addictionary? In their own words: The Addictionary is a site for word lovers and those who like to see our beloved English language grow in serious or humorous ways. We built the Addictionary to empower word-play and to help lovers of word-play showcase and market their cleverness and creativity to the world.

Discover new and exciting words like "suffragitis", "hibridicule", "preciselessness" or add your own.

Thursday

Just checked The Chronicle of Higher Ed job search pages. The postings include non-teaching positions, pretty much what I'm looking for or at least what I'll take. In case you missed it or forgot, I don't dislike teaching. I dislike teaching in a system which has so many institutional impediments to teaching and learning. Anyhow, no luck today. However, I did run across this pretty cool essay from the First Person feature in the Chronicle Careers section. It's a reflection on dealing with denial of tenure. So no jobs, but a nice essay which resonated well with me.

I'll be heading onto campus again today for more loose end tying up, then off to the dentist to make the most of the last few weeks of my dental insurance (cavities - yikes!), and then I'm scheduled to accompany my fella to the house of a faculty couple who routinely invite people over for drinking, hazing, and schmoozing. While I've been in the department and have spoken to a few people about my decision, if I go to this thing tonight, it will be the first time I'll be immerse in a high contact environment with my former faculty and peers since making my decision to leave official. By official I mean since having told staff and grad students who are integral to the departmental communication network (i.e. the gossipy people). I'd be a flat out liar if I said that the idea of going tonight hasn't given me some pause. But I'd also be lying if I denied the perverse impulse I have to not slink silently off the scene. I've had enough small scale, isolated interactions on this topic to know that some of the elements described by the author of the tenure essay seem uncannily like aspects of my own situation.

"For the time being, I have chosen the satisfaction that comes with confounding colleagues' expectations that I should be a cowering wreck. Dignity and forthrightness are easy to embody in my increasingly brief visits to the office because the bar is so low. Surprising people by merely walking upright offers both small victory and perverse amusement. I am always cordial, sometimes frank, but never ashamed.

A few people have praised my plucky stance. Being commended for how you handle tenure denial is a dubious honor, yet it also makes clear the absurdity of the logic that equates losing a tenure bid with losing dignity. I need my dignity not to prove something to my colleagues. Rather, I need it to prove to myself that I need not be helpless in this scenario. I have decisions to make."

Personal truths

Again, stealing from Bubblewench (whose blog has made me smile on more than one gloomy day). Here are some personal truths that make me smile and get me through my day.
- I have had an abundance of love in my life.
- Migraines suck, but if you can manage to rise to the occasion, migraine sex is amazing.
- Having all this time off (i.e. unemployed) means extra time with my fella and my kitty.
- We have three pounds of coffee in our fridge (sale!) and as my fella says, if you have three pounds of coffee on hand, things have gotta be at least moderately ok.
- I have a clean credit history.
- It is extremely easy to make me laugh.
- I'm pretty good at making other people laugh.
- My siblings are funny, smart, strong, and loyal.
- I know that I have made at least some aspects of a few people's lives easier or better.
- On any given day, someone somewhere is probably having the best day of their life.

Personal lies

Bubblewench has asked "What are your personal lies?" That is, lies you tell yourself to get you through your day. Here are some of mine.
- People find me more charming than abrasive.
- My cat is going to live forever.
- Someday when I live near real doctors at real hospitals and I once again have good health insurance, I will be given a diagnosis of something which explains all my daily physical ailments, is readily treatable by eating something q.i.d. that tastes remarkably like candy, which has a 100% cure rate, and which has any or all of the following side effects: boundless energy, an unshakable sense of happiness and belonging, increased intellectual efficiency, and multiple orgasms.
- I do not have an autoimmune disease.
- The real reason I haven't found a job yet is that all of these jobs I've applied for are crap. The excellent, just right job for me is still out there waiting and will make itself known ANY DAY NOW, but certainly before I run out of health insurance and money.
- My fella is not getting fed up with my seemingly endless stream of illnesses.
- My family are not getting fed up with my seemingly endless stream illnesses.
- I'll feel better tomorrow.

sign of the times

Last summer, I was at a crucial point in my decision process about whether or not to go forward with my PhD or to "cut and run". With most of the faculty from my own academic concentration rating somewhere between "clueless" and "douchebag" on the functionally useless scale, I had all but stopped trying to find academics in my department to talk out my problems with. And then I ran across this guy, this one junior professor from another academic unit in my department, and we had a really nice chat.

Well I stopped by his office again yesterday when I was on campus to officially drop out (i.e. meet with the dean and say "dude, I'm out of here...now how do I do this in a way that will not tax me in terms of me money, time, or my precious little tolerance for faculty based chicanery?"). Turns out this fellow was just up for tenure review this past year and didn't get it.

Oh. My. God.

He is an EXCELLENT faculty member. He has grant money. He has an active research program. He has great data. He's doing high impact research. His students LOVE him. He goes the extra mile for graduate and undergraduate students and for the department - the list of how would just be crazy long and it would sound like I was describing mother fucking theresa. But he didn't have enough first author publications. Thus, the department's finding was that if they could vote on the two separately, they would (a) give him tenure but (b) not promote him. This is the same deal which was given to a junior faculty member in my own academic unit this past year. The professor in my own unit is an unctuous bastard who routinely scoops the graduate student slave labor he employs, who runs a research sweat shop staffed by a gaggle of uninformed and undertrained undergraduates, and whose motto could quite reasonably be "Cramer can cram it!"

For some reason, which I do not fully understand possibly because I didn't want to pry for more information than this (outside my unit) professor was volunteering, this professor did NOT get the tenure without raise deal.

And so I left his office yesterday feeling more shaken than I had about actually officially dropping out a few hours before. On the, uh, bright (?) side, this embittering news only strengthens my conviction that I have made the right decision in leaving my program.

job posting of the day, or "girl 6"?

Actor/Actress
You could be working for the largest telecommunications company in the world! Do you have a charming voice? Do you love chit chat? If so, you may be the perfect candidate for telephone acting! You MUST have an open mind and a very charming voice!

It goes on, but really, by this point it's just about said it all. Or rather, it's said much more without explicitly saying it than much else in the job description ads to. A quick google of the company.com referred to in the posting* discloses that yes, indeed, it is phone sex. So how much does phone sex pay these days? "$15+ per hour. (hourly rate plus bonuses)" Man, I don't even WANT to know what the bonuses are for.

*It probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyhow because it's so important: For any job search, always, always google the company if a company name is given and if not, google what you can get from the posting.