My life is full of 9am meetings at the moment. Since I am not a 9am person, this is making me grumpy. (Really, am I not paying enough of a tribute to the gods of early mornings by starting work at 8.30 five days out of seven? Can't I keep my two precious, precious mornings where the alarm clock doesn't wake me at all?) But it's induction weekend coming up, and so meetings there must be, including meetings where both academic and admin staff are present.
Well, there weren't any fights. I suppose that's a plus.
If most of your university time is spent around academics, your view of the non-academic staff is shaped by the views of those around you. Non-academic staff are something like the pest snails in my aquarium: they turn up out of nowhere, they reproduce at a staggering rate, and they get everywhere. Oh, maybe they eat algae. Still. Algae. Small price to pay.
This meeting, I got to see better than ever before just what the academic staff look like to the admin people. And. Well. I hate to phrase it this way, but we are a bunch of whiny self-centred little brats.
One meeting, about one very specific topic, and I counted:
- two people asking totally irrelevant questions about administrative matters that, they wished everyone else in the room to know, made them unhappy
- one lengthy grumbling interlude from the members of one particular department, re: a change in university policy that the academic departments are split over anyway, that required an actual shushing from the person speaking at the time
- four people saying some variation of "If I have to come in on Monday...", with the definite implication that though such a strenuous task might turn them into a broken and shambling wreck, they would be willing to make such a sacrifice for future generations of academics to continue the noble fight after they had gone.
Oh, people.
[September Blue] says (23:25:40): "Results 1 - 10 of about 451,000 for entourage eating e-mail" Oh GOODY, it's not just me.
[Laz] says: (23:26:35): you really want "Results 1-10 of about 451,000 for entourage regurgitating email" methinks.
Two days of fighting with Entourage, and I'm reconsidering my initial glee over getting Microsoft Office from work for £6. No, legally and everything! And the only downside is that it will eat three weeks worth of e-mail every time you start up Entourage! Although to be honest, if that was the deal upfront I still might've bought it just for Powerpoint.
(Okay, any Googlers who got here for desperate Entourage e-mail consumption problems: if your incoming e-mail is set up as a POP account, check Mailing List Manager and you'll likely see some rule set up about moving all your messages to Folders On My Computer. If it's an Exchange account, then it's just being cranky for reasons unknown to the combined wisdom of all the IT people at my work, but you can fix it by deleting your account preferences completely and then setting up the account again. Your gobbled e-mail is probably still there saved to Folders On My Computer; if it's not immediately obvious, and a search isn't turning it up either, go to Sent Directly to Me under Mail Views below that, and they will all magically appear there.)
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A week before the start of the semester, and I'm setting up Entourage on my computer. (I hate Entourage, but there's a huge epic fight going on between Apple Mail, my ISP, and my university network, and I'd rather just not get involved in that right now.)
At the moment, it's updating my folders.
More specifically: at the moment, it's showing me the words 'Now updating Students' next to a blue bar that's inching further and further to the right.
NOT YET DAMN IT! NOT YET!
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And it's not even from Apple! These are from the back of an art journal I acquired a few copies of recently (and by 'acquired', I mean 'rescued from a skip' - they were too nice to be pulped). I have nothing interesting or insightful to say about the advertising techniques here, except that everyone who doesn't believe me about what HMV stands for shall henceforth be referred to image 2 in an appropriately smug manner; I just love the design work.
Also, I want that chair.
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In which I compare academia to a party in a way I will probably regret
Friday, 5 September 2008
2
comments
Or, Why I Have Not Been Writing Anything About My Own Academic Work On Here Recently. To which the short answer is: because I haven't been doing any. I'm busy, but that's not why. Being entirely honest, it's more because I struggle to care at the moment.
This doesn't mean I don't care about my subject. I still find my subject pretty interesting, especially now that the PhD jitters have worn off a bit, and I would continue to find it interesting if I gave up academia entirely tomorrow. Translating that interest into actual academic work, though - writing journal-format articles in academic prose, hunting down what Big Name Theorists have to say about related matters because someone might ask me one day and I should have an answer, trying to get published - that stuff is getting to be somewhat more of a drag than it used to be. To put it mildly.
Okay, okay, I know. It's part of the job, it's the difference between being an academic and being someone who knows a lot about X obscure field of Victorian literature (and while I think about half my readers already know what this is, I'm going to leave it blank here anyway in fear that future academics won't work out who I am and decide not to hire me based entirely on this post, so obviously I do still care about this academic stuff a little). It's what I need to do to get a job, and I shouldn't claim I want to be in academia if I whine about having to do all the boring stuff ("Klinger, aren't you ashamed of yourself?" "Yes, sir! I don't deserve to be in the army!"). I know this. And, yet.
Imagine it this way: There's a party. It's a great party, full of the kind of people you really want to talk to having fascinating conversations about stuff you find interesting. It's not perfect - of course it's not perfect - but still, you know you'd rather be in that room having those conversations than at any other party on the planet.
Now, imagine also that there are chores to be done at this party, and that everyone must take time out from the really fun stuff to get those things done. Glasses need to be collected and washed, bowls of Twiglets* need to be refilled, sandwiches need to be made, someone's got to phone taxis home for the semi-conscious drunks - you know the sort of thing (especially if you've been to some of the conferences I've been to). Also, periodically someone's got to write letters to the neighbours explaining what's going on over here and why they should continue to support it through their patience, assistance, and donations of time, money and Twiglets. And those letters are very time-consuming and boring, etc etc etc, and nobody likes doing this stuff - but it's the price you pay for getting to have the fun conversations, and so that's what everyone does. Everyone. Including all those people having the fun conversations
Now, imagine further that the party is in a small house; that more people want to get in than there is room for people inside; and that anyone on the waiting list has to hang around outside the house, in the mud and the rain, waiting for a possible vacancy.
And. Further. That the people waiting outside have to prove their dedication to the party by:
- explaining that really, they are seriously good at writing begging letters to the neighbours;
- finding ways to demonstrate their Twiglet-bowl-filling abilities, even when they are allowed near neither Twiglet nor bowl;
- and pressing their ear to the window while standing awkwardly in a flower-bed, trying to hear enough of the fun conversations to prove that they really do know what's going on and totally could have something great to contribute if only someone would let them in.
See what I'm saying, here? It's not that I don't want to be part of a scholarly conversation about a topic I find interesting. It's just that I am standing in a flowerbed, and it is dark, and there are slugs. That scholarly conversation is full of people who have library access and can go to conferences, two things which are far from certainties for most unemployed post-PhDs; how are we supposed to keep up with the current state of research in our area when the means by which that knowledge is usually transmitted is restricted access only? At least I'm lucky enough, working in a university library, to have all the borrowing privileges I want plus a few I probably shouldn't have - what are my post-PhD friends supposed to do, buy personal subscriptions to all relevant journals themselves?
So, back to the boring stuff. The bibliography-checking. The academic-prose-ifying. The conversion of MHRA into MLA formats, with all the wailing and rending of hair that goes in its path. This stuff? This stuff, I would manage to do with minimal grumbling if it was the price to pay for being part of academia, in the same way that I wouldn't mind cleaning glasses at the party if it was the price to pay for joining in the good conversations in the living room. But cleaning glasses outside in the cold? Less tempting, that. Less tempting by a long, long way.
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* - Twiglets, for those of you whose upbringing cruelly deprived you of the experience.
So, back to the boring stuff. The bibliography-checking. The academic-prose-ifying. The conversion of MHRA into MLA formats, with all the wailing and rending of hair that goes in its path. This stuff? This stuff, I would manage to do with minimal grumbling if it was the price to pay for being part of academia, in the same way that I wouldn't mind cleaning glasses at the party if it was the price to pay for joining in the good conversations in the living room. But cleaning glasses outside in the cold? Less tempting, that. Less tempting by a long, long way.
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* - Twiglets, for those of you whose upbringing cruelly deprived you of the experience.
Man on phone: "So I said, you know, he already takes her swimming, he takes her to school and everything, but she's not his kid, is she?" Pause. "Well of course he's going to get on with her, he's basically a kid himself."
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Teenager #1: "George Lazenby, then... I don't know. Then Sean Connery?"
Teenager #2: "I'd say Pierce Brosnan, then Sean Connery."
Teenager #1: "Oh, yeah! George Lazenby, Pierce Brosnan, then Sean Connery."
Teenager #3: "I'm going to have to ask you both to leave this train right now, while it's moving."
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Mother to small child: "Look at all the cows!"
Small child to mother: "Mummy, what happens when you die?"
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1. My [great-]uncle once saw a ghost in the Australian outback. A man in a dusty coat, some time near the end of the First World War. Maybe he was walking home.
2. Never in my life have I ever managed to skim a flat stone more than three jumps over water.
3. When I was five I planned to marry my friend Fiona, live in a cottage in the woods we would build out of the stones from an old sheep-pen (we'd settled on the plot already), grow a small garden, have horses instead of cars, and heal sick animals for a living. I've had worse plans.
4. Secondary school was, as I always suspected at the time, not in fact the location of the best days of my life.
5. I will never forget being caught right underneath sheet lightning on top of a hill during a storm. The whole world froze blue-white.
6. Once I met Timmy Mallett. I was absolutely terrified and begged my parents to take me away.
7. There’s this boy I know who once knelt down and sang 'Words' to me in a public place, then didn't speak to me for two days before complaining about all the spectators that now thought he liked me when he totally didn't and what had I said to them, then got drunk and spent a whole party following me around begging me to kiss him, then denied even thinking any such thing because "God, why would I?", then started going out with a girl who looked eerily like me. Eleven years later, he's a very good friend and my intermittently on-call translator for Screwed-up Boy.
8. Once, at a bar a massively bearded alcoholic vagrant called Railway Dave asked me to marry him.
9. By noon, I’m usually wishing I could go home and get some teaching preparation done, these days. Sad, but true. (Note: do not mistake my total panic for conscientious devotion to the job, here. I've got a terrifying amount of unfamiliar stuff to teach this semester, and it's giving me nightmares.)
10. Last night I dreamed about a tornado, as I have been doing on and off for about six months now. I haven't looked up what tornados are supposed to symbolise in any of those dream dictionaries because I'm guessing it won't be good.
11. If only I had a large reef aquarium of my very own.
12. Next time I go to church I will once again catch myself wondering who thought outlining the large picture of Jesus in glitter was a good idea, even if the large picture of Jesus could be defended on aesthetic grounds in the first place, which, truly, it can't. Reformations have started for less.
13. What worries me most is thinking about who I want to be when I grow up. I'm 28...
14. When I turn my head left I see some of my fish, Disraeli and four of the PRB (who are neon tetra and as such don't have individual names).
15. When I turn my head right I see my other fish, Orson, and the bubble nest he built. I am so proud.
16. You know I’m lying when I say anything about how much I liked working on my PhD. For some reason I tend to say this a lot, maybe so I don't have to turn every polite enquiry into my academic life into one long wail of agony, but it is all lies.
17. What I miss most about the Eighties is the way I could wrap myself up in a book like a blanket, to the total exclusion of the rest of the world, for hours and days on end. I can't read like that now.
18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I’d be killed off in Act I.
19. By this time next year I will have an academic job if I have to sell my soul for it.
20. A better name for me would be Beth, according to two people who don't know each other but both picked the same name unprompted. And then told me about it in a slightly disappointed way, as though I really should have been called Beth and the world is slightly out of joint because I wasn't.
21. I have a hard time understanding how people can stop and ask for directions when they're only a little bit lost. That's like admitting defeat!
22. If I ever go back to school, I’ll expect my friends to stage an intervention. Do I look insane to you?
23. You know I like you if I describe you as 'interesting'.
24. If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be the foolish awards committee, because what on earth would I be getting an award for? My PhD acknowledgements narrowly escaped being a bitter and vitriolic list of everything that conspired to make my life more difficult over those four years ('and special thanks go to Estates & Buildings, for planning that major noisy renovation work all around my office for the last few months of writing up! Love you!')
25. Take my advice, never get tabasco sauce in your eye. Trust me. I feel so strongly about this one that I want to tour schools warning the next generation.
26. My ideal breakfast is made by someone else.
27. A song I love but do not have is Steve Earle, 'Number 29'. It reminds me of my dad.
28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest you go and get some of my friends who've been saying for years and years that it's a dump and they're getting out as soon as they can, grab them by the collar, and say 'This is your chance. There will never be a better time to leave than today.'
29. Why won’t people leave better newspapers behind them on trains? Guardian and Indy readers, you are stingy, stingy people.
30. If you spend a night at my house you will likely be woken by pigeons in the morning.
31. I’d stop my wedding for a sandwich, to be honest. I don't have any principled objections to marriage, but I find it difficult to imagine myself in a position where I'd get that enthusiastic about my own.
32. The world could do without war, infectious disease, bad coffee, bus drivers who pretend they don't see you and keep driving, that proposed remake of The Lady from Shanghai with Nicole Kidman in Rita Hayworth's role, wasps, the gritty debris that gathers under sofa cushions, and men who do not know what they want.
33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than eat an oyster.
34. My favorite blond(e) is my friend and undergrad flatmate James, whose hair has been described as 'polluted beach colour'.
35. Paper clips are more useful than swearing at vending machines when there's a money-jam that needs dislodging.
36. If I do anything well it’s building flat-pack furniture.
37. I can’t help but stay awake as long as possible, just to spite being tired.
38. I usually cry only when something is really shaking me up. Films, books, sad songs - nope.
39. My advice to my [hypothetical future] nephew/niece is that your grandparents rock, and you should remember that.
40. And by the way, I was just listening to the Richard Marx song 'Hazard' (shush, now) and how did I never notice that he's responsible for the girl's disappearance? She 'went out walking all alone', but he 'left her by the river'? He did it! Him! The townspeople were correct: the boy's not right!
2. Never in my life have I ever managed to skim a flat stone more than three jumps over water.
3. When I was five I planned to marry my friend Fiona, live in a cottage in the woods we would build out of the stones from an old sheep-pen (we'd settled on the plot already), grow a small garden, have horses instead of cars, and heal sick animals for a living. I've had worse plans.
4. Secondary school was, as I always suspected at the time, not in fact the location of the best days of my life.
5. I will never forget being caught right underneath sheet lightning on top of a hill during a storm. The whole world froze blue-white.
6. Once I met Timmy Mallett. I was absolutely terrified and begged my parents to take me away.
7. There’s this boy I know who once knelt down and sang 'Words' to me in a public place, then didn't speak to me for two days before complaining about all the spectators that now thought he liked me when he totally didn't and what had I said to them, then got drunk and spent a whole party following me around begging me to kiss him, then denied even thinking any such thing because "God, why would I?", then started going out with a girl who looked eerily like me. Eleven years later, he's a very good friend and my intermittently on-call translator for Screwed-up Boy.
8. Once, at a bar a massively bearded alcoholic vagrant called Railway Dave asked me to marry him.
9. By noon, I’m usually wishing I could go home and get some teaching preparation done, these days. Sad, but true. (Note: do not mistake my total panic for conscientious devotion to the job, here. I've got a terrifying amount of unfamiliar stuff to teach this semester, and it's giving me nightmares.)
10. Last night I dreamed about a tornado, as I have been doing on and off for about six months now. I haven't looked up what tornados are supposed to symbolise in any of those dream dictionaries because I'm guessing it won't be good.
11. If only I had a large reef aquarium of my very own.
12. Next time I go to church I will once again catch myself wondering who thought outlining the large picture of Jesus in glitter was a good idea, even if the large picture of Jesus could be defended on aesthetic grounds in the first place, which, truly, it can't. Reformations have started for less.
13. What worries me most is thinking about who I want to be when I grow up. I'm 28...
14. When I turn my head left I see some of my fish, Disraeli and four of the PRB (who are neon tetra and as such don't have individual names).
15. When I turn my head right I see my other fish, Orson, and the bubble nest he built. I am so proud.
16. You know I’m lying when I say anything about how much I liked working on my PhD. For some reason I tend to say this a lot, maybe so I don't have to turn every polite enquiry into my academic life into one long wail of agony, but it is all lies.
17. What I miss most about the Eighties is the way I could wrap myself up in a book like a blanket, to the total exclusion of the rest of the world, for hours and days on end. I can't read like that now.
18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I’d be killed off in Act I.
19. By this time next year I will have an academic job if I have to sell my soul for it.
20. A better name for me would be Beth, according to two people who don't know each other but both picked the same name unprompted. And then told me about it in a slightly disappointed way, as though I really should have been called Beth and the world is slightly out of joint because I wasn't.
21. I have a hard time understanding how people can stop and ask for directions when they're only a little bit lost. That's like admitting defeat!
22. If I ever go back to school, I’ll expect my friends to stage an intervention. Do I look insane to you?
23. You know I like you if I describe you as 'interesting'.
24. If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be the foolish awards committee, because what on earth would I be getting an award for? My PhD acknowledgements narrowly escaped being a bitter and vitriolic list of everything that conspired to make my life more difficult over those four years ('and special thanks go to Estates & Buildings, for planning that major noisy renovation work all around my office for the last few months of writing up! Love you!')
25. Take my advice, never get tabasco sauce in your eye. Trust me. I feel so strongly about this one that I want to tour schools warning the next generation.
26. My ideal breakfast is made by someone else.
27. A song I love but do not have is Steve Earle, 'Number 29'. It reminds me of my dad.
28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest you go and get some of my friends who've been saying for years and years that it's a dump and they're getting out as soon as they can, grab them by the collar, and say 'This is your chance. There will never be a better time to leave than today.'
29. Why won’t people leave better newspapers behind them on trains? Guardian and Indy readers, you are stingy, stingy people.
30. If you spend a night at my house you will likely be woken by pigeons in the morning.
31. I’d stop my wedding for a sandwich, to be honest. I don't have any principled objections to marriage, but I find it difficult to imagine myself in a position where I'd get that enthusiastic about my own.
32. The world could do without war, infectious disease, bad coffee, bus drivers who pretend they don't see you and keep driving, that proposed remake of The Lady from Shanghai with Nicole Kidman in Rita Hayworth's role, wasps, the gritty debris that gathers under sofa cushions, and men who do not know what they want.
33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than eat an oyster.
34. My favorite blond(e) is my friend and undergrad flatmate James, whose hair has been described as 'polluted beach colour'.
35. Paper clips are more useful than swearing at vending machines when there's a money-jam that needs dislodging.
36. If I do anything well it’s building flat-pack furniture.
37. I can’t help but stay awake as long as possible, just to spite being tired.
38. I usually cry only when something is really shaking me up. Films, books, sad songs - nope.
39. My advice to my [hypothetical future] nephew/niece is that your grandparents rock, and you should remember that.
40. And by the way, I was just listening to the Richard Marx song 'Hazard' (shush, now) and how did I never notice that he's responsible for the girl's disappearance? She 'went out walking all alone', but he 'left her by the river'? He did it! Him! The townspeople were correct: the boy's not right!
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On a date last week in a sidling-up-to-trendy bar, the man I was with asked if I'd always planned to go into academia. Not really, I said, which is both true and not that unusual; lots of young academics seem to wear the same faintly confused expression, as if they'd closed their eyes for a second and woke up somewhere they didn't even know existed. I wanted to be a doctor. And then before that, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. And then before that, I wanted to be a vet. And then before that, a writer, I think? And before that a Jedi. Although, to be honest, I still want to be a Jedi.
"Well," he said, "you must have been quite academic at school, right?"
And three hundred miles away, all my old teachers clapped their hands over their faces and shrieked as one through their twitching fingers.
I was academic in the sense that I was clever and liked reading, yeah. I got good GCSEs and decent A-levels, and I didn't set fire to anything on school property. But from the time my dad called me downstairs after a parents' evening and said "I think your German teacher wants you dead," my future in higher education was, let's say, somewhat uncertain. It would be nice to claim that my teachers didn't appreciate my true genius. Really, though, I was just a brat, and a brat I remained for the rest of my time at school. Clever enough to get good grades without putting in much effort, and reluctant to put in any effort at all so long as there was something - anything - better to do with my time. What were they going to do to me? Put me in detention? Detention was half an hour of standing outside the staffroom, at lunchtime when I had to be at school anyway; homework was two hours of pointless busywork in my own time. This wasn't a difficult choice.
After a while, it took on the form of a semi-principled stand, and I stopped claiming I'd just forgotten to do the homework yet again in favour of protesting that I had to do it in the first place. It couldn't be about helping me to do better in exams and coursework, because I was getting excellent marks for those anyway; it couldn't be about improving my understanding of the subject, because if that needed improving, I wouldn't be doing as well at the exams and the coursework anyway; so what was it about, if not just jumping through hoops to justify the hoops being there? My teachers told me that there would come a day when I wouldn't be able to sail through on minimal effort, and come that day I'd be grateful for developing a work ethic. I shrugged, and went back to pointedly reading Solzhenitsyn in detention, which was where I spent most of my lunchtimes. I'm fairly sure I still have outstanding detention, come to think of it.
There were a few of us who took the same approach. Kate got into an argument with our biology teacher about whether or not she should improve her presentation ("but you already marked me down for it, and I still got an A - so who cares?"). Vicky proudly showed her GCSE grades to her French teacher on results day - excellent, despite predictions of failure, shame, and a life on minimum wage on the Morrisons tills - to be met with "Vicky, I don't even want to look at you right now." We talked through classes, put our feet on the tables, competed with each other about how many different store cupboards we had been sent to sit in to Think About What We'd Done. All of us got threatened with suspension at least once; during one incident, all of us got called in individually to be interrogated by a very angry head of IT, who told us all without reservation that if he ever managed to prove we'd done the thing he suspected we had then we were gone, that minute, and it was going to take some pretty impressive grovelling if we even wanted to be let back in to sit our exams. (He never did prove it.) We were brats. We were awful. We were the reason I couldn't ever be a secondary school teacher.
When I was thirteen, after several weeks of not doing any homework at all, my English teacher reached over my desk, grabbed me around the throat with both hands, and shook me. The whole class went quiet and stared. He let go, we looked at each other in stunned silence for a moment or two, then he told us all to read up to page 53 and left the room. I'm not sure in retrospect what's more surprising: that one of my teachers tried to strangle me, or that the rest of them never gave in to the temptation.
So, no, I wouldn't say I was particularly academic at school.
"So why did you decide to go into academia?" the man I was with asked, after a heavily summarised version of the above.
Huh. Good question.
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I'm now up to 2,307 words of the article, including a couple of paragraphs copied over from the original draft I was working on back in March. I thought that these were all good words. But, no.
2,307 words, of which three are - and I quote - 'somethingy somethingy something'.
Why do I do this to myself?
The politics of sharing a desk, one moment among many:
"Have you got the bottom drawer? What's in the bottom drawer?"
"Scissors."
"Middle drawer?"
"The other scissors."
"Top drawer?"
"Stolen stuff and crisps."
In the library, we are moving boxes of books. Heavy boxes of books. Seventy-nine heavy boxes of books. In the world below stairs, a strange land of Escher-like corridors stacked with faded posters, ancient dust-covered boxes of type, and something we think is a machine for binding books, I'm both the only woman and the only person under five foot nine. My colleagues have mastered the art of saying in a very gallant way "Oh, you shouldn't be carrying that! That's heavy!" as they neatly sidestep out of the way of me and the painfully heavy box of books I'm juuuuuuuust about balancing.
My forearms are bruised from carrying the damn things, and my forearms are not looking wonderful anyway after the bad sunburn I got a couple of weeks ago. Still pink, especially under the library lights, and still peeling off in little flakes of gruesome. It's gone beyond "ouch!" to "ew" to "Wasn't that an X Files episode once?"
In better news, I now have 1,624 words of the article I put on hiatus in spring while I was finishing some other stuff. At least 75% of them are good words. I feel very productive.
(I should add that the stolen stuff in the conversation above referred to stuff sneaked from the stationary cupboard, not, you know, actually stolen stuff. I firmly believe that most office-based work is one long drawn-out episode of stealth warfare over the good stuff in the stationary cupboard.)
(An American traveller writing to the (London) Times on the subject of rail travel in Britain. Oct 1, 1890.)
If the traveller wishes to get from the up platform to the down platform, or
vice versa, he is obliged to cross over the line by a bridge or under the line
through a subway, but he cannot cross the line itself. I am aware that the
raising of the platform several feet above the level of the line has two
advantages; it prevents accidents, and it makes the getting into a carriage very
easy. Nevertheless, these bridges and subways are a sore trial to my temper, and
I would willingly risk (as I do in America and generally on the Continent) being
knocked down by an engine rather than climb those stairs, and I have frequently
rushed across the line, much to the consternation of the amiable but too careful
officials. The expense of lowering the platforms to the level of the lines would
be so great (to say nothing of the advantages mentioned above) that I know it
will never be done; but I cannot say that this knowledge makes the inconvenience
more easily borne, or reconciles me to the awful thought that for ever and ever
travellers in England must perpetually ascend bridges and descend subways.
Two and a half of my jobs are in the middle of a pay restructuring process. Still. I grow weary of this. Leaving aside all the fill-in-the-blanks griping about management and bureaucracies and The Problem With Higher Education Today etc etc, though, here's a thing: why can't it just be about the money?
No, I'm serious. I don't mean the work itself; I'm fine with not getting paid a fortune to do any of the things I do. I mean the discussions about the jobs, and what the pay is for the jobs, that come up two or three or sixteen times a year. The kind of discussions that involve me snapping at one of my bosses, for the first (and hopefully the last) time, when he responded to my "But you agree I've been underpaid for the last two years?" with "I think you're taking this a bit far - it's not like anyone deliberately set out to pay you less than you should have been." The kind that include every single discussion about teaching pay, which by unspoken academic law cannot take place without a litany of disavowal: it's really good experience and we need it for our cvs and really we should be grateful there's any teaching for us at all and of course we care about the students and we're not in this for the money and we know the university's budget is struggling and we know the department's doing all it can and we hate to even vaguely imply otherwise - so, um, will we be paid for office hours this semester? Sorry to ask so bluntly! Sorry to ask at all! Sorry to keep bringing this subject up when you've already said that you think it's a shame you can't pay us all as much as you'd like to!
Oh, now, look. Discussions about pay are just that - discussions about pay. It's not personal. I didn't complain about being underpaid for two years because I worried that everyone above me in the hierarchy was a evil moustache-twirling villain who went home and kicked their dog every night. I really don't care whether they underpaid me through malice or forgetfulness or accident or what. I complained because I wasn't getting paid what I should have been paid. Ditto, teaching, where I know that the department is operating under tough financial constraints and that the people responsible for budget allocations would pay TAs generously if they had all the money in the world to do it. I believe the sympathy, and I appreciate the sympathy, and continuing to haggle over pay does not mean I am rejecting the sympathy or calling anyone evil - it just means that I'd like to get paid, please, because I'm operating under tough financial constraints as well.
Yeah, a bit grumpy today. But, honestly. Here's the kind of pay issue I'm talking about here: in one of my jobs, which involves working quite closely with students (I was going to specify whether it's the teaching one or the non-teaching one, but I doubt it matters) , the pay restructuring has involved reclassifying something which was once paid work into something that's neither paid for nor on the contract. It's not essential for doing the job, but it is useful (both for me and my colleagues and for the students), and it's understood that people in my particular role will be spending a couple of hours a week doing this particular duty anyway, even under the restructured pay system.
Oh, I do not think so.
But do you know how difficult it is to have a conversation about this that doesn't turn into a) a debate about whether I naively misunderstand the pressures of university finance or b) a debate about whether I cruelly underestimate the purity of my boss's convictions in truly, madly, deeply wanting the situation to be otherwise? And that's not even getting into c), in which I struggle in vain to find a way to phrase my objections that doesn't come across as 'I don't care about the students - I'm in this for the cash.'
I like my jobs. I do. I'm just not doing them for free.
Get home from work at quarter past ten, tired and bad-tempered and annoyed with the boss who wants eight weeks of work done in two. Slump up the road, down the other road, up to the door and place key in lock. Turn key.
Click.
Key turns half-way and no further. Hmm. Try jiggling it round in lock, plus various combinations of pushing door forward/pulling door back while turning, without success. Hmm.
Take key out of lock. Examine key. Examine other keys on ring. Try all of those, just in case. Step back and inspect building door is attached to, just in case. Establish beyond doubt that key and door belong together. Lick finger, run along edges of key, place key in lock, turn.
Click.
All right, this is not funny.
It looks like someone has clicked the snib on the lock from the inside, thus preventing anyone from getting in without help from someone on the other side of the door. Consider this. Decide neighbours couldn't possibly be that stupid, and that failure of door to open is merely illusion of own tired mind. Place key in lock. Turn key.
Click.
Third Law of Shared Buildings: one of your neighbours is always that stupid.
Try pressing buzzers of neighbours' flats with dim hope that anyone will answer - buzzers rung after ten at night in this building tend to be rung by crazy shrieking banshee friend of one of the neighbours, who should not be encouraged. Indeed, buzzers go unanswered. Consider the idea that one of those buzzers must to person who put snib on lock in the first place. Wonder if they are the same person who allows crazy shrieking banshee friend to wake everyone up at 4am. Fume in ineffective silence.
Consider options.
Friends a few doors down have big shared garden, separated from my building's small shared mudpatch and mattress graveyard by two walls and whatever lies in between them. If walls climbable and mysterious area navigable, could get into back of building and bypass need for security door. Call friends.
Phones go straight to voicemail.
Curse world.
Consider other options. At the back of mudpatch/mattress graveyard there are the back walls of two grand-looking houses. There might be some space there, or at least some way to climb through from the other side. Head off to investigate.
Access to houses behind locked gates in big wall. Only way in without key is to Spiderman it forty feet up along very narrow top of mostly-medieval wall until a point where the ground comes up to meet it on the side where the houses are. Consider that a) wall was designed to repel invaders, b) climbing along wall means climbing past small clusters of teenagers smoking outside pub, several of whom I will probably end up teaching next semester if I end up falling off a wall in front of them because the universe would not pass up a joke that good, and c) climbing on important mostly-medieval things possibly punishable by death at hands of tourist board. Decide to call this plan B.
Return to own door, just in case. Try key in lock again. Just in case.
Click.
Wish death upon neighbours.
Notice lights still on in empty-looking restaurant below flat. Go in, find head waiter clearing tables. Explain situation.
Head waiter looks sceptical. "Why you not have key?"
Show keys to waiter. Explain ineffectiveness of key at its usual task. Waiter produces own keys, heads outside to door, places key in lock...
Click.
Waiter grumbles. "Your neighbours, so much trouble. Always they come in asking to be let in here. Always they shout. Sometimes they bang door. So much trouble."
Agree, fervently. Commiserate. Share with waiter latest exploits of crazy shrieking banshee friend of neighbours. Realise am still standing outside on pavement.
Waiter promises to find other waiter who will go through kitchen and attempt door from other side. Disappears back into restaurant, reappears several minutes later looking determined. Waits with me until footsteps are heard on other side of door. Smiles.
On other side of door, mysterious unseen waiter pulls at handle, then attempts to turn lock.
Click.
Turn to head waiter. Raise arms, eyebrows. Head waiter leans into door and shouts to other waiter in langauge I do not speak. Other waiter shouts back. More rattling. Head waiter shouts some more. Other waiter conquers lock.
Clunk. Door opens.
"They had turned snib on door!", head waiter says. "Who would do stupid thing like this? You should leave them note."
Oh, I will. Believe me.
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I'm skipping work today to put some time in on an article I need to get written... well, two years ago would have been good, but let's just say 'soon'. The two jobs I should be doing this afternoon and evening aren't shift-work, thankfully, but the work in question does need to be completed at some point, and there's a lot of it. So, guilt. Especially since I know there was a time when I juggled four jobs plus the PhD and still managed to get stuff done - why can't I be that productive now?
It doesn't help that the article's stalled again at the reading stage, and this never feels like work unless I'm taking copious notes I'll never look at again just for the hell of it. It's so difficult to measure progress this way. Pages read? Books read? (What when none of them are useful?) Percentage of full thought process complete? I wish there was a unit for calculating this. I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere, plus I'm skipping the jobs where progress is not only measurable but pays by the hour.
(And lo! My phone beeps with a text from a colleague asking in a puzzled way if I'm not usually around on Wednesdays. Sigh.)
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