Victorianitas

I'm on a train. It's packed. I'm balancing on my one square foot of floor space in the bit between the doors, along with eight other people and one pissed-off baby in a pushchair. Meanwhile, all my earthly belongings have already made it to the new flat in the movers' very spacious lorry. I am reconsidering my decision not to pack myself into a box and get carried on board when they weren't looking.

Ha, the baby is staring thoughtfully at a watch it's wearing while tapping the watch-face with one finger. How very dignified.

My rucksack is really getting rather heavy now. I'd swap it for the bag at my feet (which holds three house-plants and a desk lamp - nothing like moving house to bring back those undergraduate days!) but there is no room to manouevre at all.

Ten more minutes... (and then a short walk, and then ten more minutes on another train, and then another short walk, and then I have to unpack, and then tomorrow I'm going back to the old place to clean it to Give-Me-My-Deposit-Back standards, and then on Monday morning I have to meet the letting agents there so they can inspect it, but then I'm DONE.)

One of the people who works upstairs from me came into my office today to let us both know that there was a Strange Smell on the staircase, and that Estates & Buildings were on it. "It might be another dead cat," she said. "We've had that happen before, and there used to be a lot of stray cats that came into the crawlspace here to have kittens, for years and years - I suppose they just always had..."

Dead cat or no dead cat, I'm loving the idea of working in a building that eighteen generations of stray cats have come to think of as the Mothership. And that's not even counting the cool Being John Malkovich door that lets you crawl through to the department next door.

I like this place!

You know what's most difficult to get used to about the new job? I get evenings and weekends off. I get to go home when there's still hours left in the day. It sounds like paradise (seriously!), but it's surprisingly hard to adjust to all the same, especially when things are busy (as things inevitably are); I'm used to working twice the hours for a third of the pay, and I've been doing that for so long that this feels somehow skewed.

But I'm not complaining. Oh, hell no.

Anyway, more later, to a vague approximation of 'later'. I'm off out for dinner to celebrate the good fortunes of my brave little finally-fought-its-way-to-publication article.

I love my new job to pieces, but there's a lot to get used to.

First: The keys. I have office keys which must not be lost on pain of death (or on pain of someone in Estates & Buildings rolling their eyes at me, I'm not quite sure how they do things round here). I'm used to punch-codes. A minor thing, you might think, but you haven't had to lock up this place; I've been leaving at half-past five most evenings, when most people are gone already, and honestly I think there are fewer locks on the White House.

Second: The money. I don't have to worry about it any more.

Third: The move from a small, neatly-enclosed university outside a middling-sized town to a huge, sprawling university campus in a huge, sprawling city. This one is old enough to have towers and turrets and hundreds of years of traditions building up like layers of sediment on the buildings. What do you mean, your office is over there? There's a bloody great road here! That's still campus?

Fourth: The being treated like an adult who actually works there. Not that I didn't work at the last place (in multiple posts, actually, and, ha, you should have been there for the confusion and commotion when I had to fill in 'Job Title' on a single form for handing in my notice), but - okay, think of it like this. My last place, there was an office set aside for those of us PhDs who did hourly-paid teaching (US readers, 'adjuncts'; my department called us 'postdocs', but fuck off, department, postdocs get salaries). There were more desks than there were people. Nevertheless, one of the secretaries threw an absolute fit over the idea that we actually left stuff on our desks ('Those are hot-desks!' 'Yes, but they're hot-desks for us, so we didn't -' 'They're hot-desks!' 'YOU DON'T EVEN GIVE US SHELVES'). First day of the new job? 'This one's your desk, and oh, please rearrange any of the furniture you like! Make yourself at home!'

Fifth: The job itself. But I'm handling that. I think.

My new job starts tomorrow. Well, actually... according to the contract HR eventually did give me, my new job starts today, but today is a Sunday and I was on holiday, so, tomorrow.

I have no idea what to do.

I know. They'll tell me. That's the point. And the scope and flexibility of this job are major parts of its appeal. But! I can't help thinking that if they're going to pay me a real live salary, I should be some kind of telepathic superpowered research machine who doesn't need telling.

It'll be okay. And as soon as I can convince myself that this isn't literally too good to be true, it'll feel okay, too.

After a long, long wait on the other side of a large desk, while people fetched people and those people fetched other people who thought that actually my paperwork had been left with the first set of people anyway, there were things to sign. One of them had the word 'Contract' at the top.

"Oh," said one of the last people, "we need to see your passport."
"But the letter you sent me said -"
"And we can't process this until you give us a P45, either. So when you bring those in we can go ahead."
"But you said - all right, listen. I don't have the passport which you specifically told me you wouldn't need to see until later, which I meant to bring it in anyway and forgot because yesterday was so hectic I didn't even have time to eat lunch before getting the train here last night, and I don't have a P45 yet for the same perfectly standard reason I told you five minutes ago was why I don't have a P45 yet which, by the way, you told me was absolutely fine, and I will get the passport, and I will bring that in, but already today I have to find my new office and meet my new colleagues for lunch and view two flats and try to get to the letting agents before someone else gets the one I want and try to convince my current letting agents that they won't be charging me rent until April, and I have to phone all these people and print off all these things and fill in so many forms, and I'm leaving four jobs I've been doing for years and a lot of people I like and a city I know to move to somewhere that is new and strange and different, and now you are refusing to process the paperwork because I can't give you one thing you already told me you didn't want to see just yet and one thing you know I can't get until March, and I am overwhelmed and exhausted and I have not stopped for days and days and days and now it's raining and my feet are soggy little lumps of melting ice. Please, please, just take the contract."
"Do you have an original birth certificate on you?"

No, HR, I do not have an original birth certificate on me.

Today, I go to put down a deposit on a flat I really really want. I will be bringing my passport.

My new job starts very soon. I lack a contract. This is annoying.

I'm sure there will be a contract (I was only offered the job last week, and these things can take a while to get rolling at the best of times; plus, even in the darkest circles of academic gloom, I've never heard of someone being interviewed for a position for which the funding's already in place, offered the job, arranged start dates with, and then told 'You know what? Actually, no'), but there is not a contract right now. There's nothing on paper right now. And so, I'm handing in my notice at the library, telling my current department that I'm leaving and they'll need to find someone to cover my teaching, looking for a new place to live, and telling the letting agents that I'm ending my lease, all on the strength of a couple of phone calls. The time-frame doesn't allow much alternative to that, but I'm not loving it. Just a piece of paper, HR! Please!

There's a short version and a long version of what I've been up to for the past few weeks. The short version is just a row of exclamation marks, so moving on to the longer one:

I got a job.

An academic job.

A real, live, those-things-still-exist? academic job.

It's a fixed-term postdoc position (scientists, bear with me, you're far from home and things are different here) working on a big and fascinating project. The work will be really interesting, the people seem lovely, the job pays about two and a half times as much as all my existing jobs put together, and I could go on, but I'm still so stunned that they actually wanted to hire me that it's difficult enough to stop the confused blinking long enough to even type this.

It starts really soon. I'm hoping the confused blinking will have stopped by then.

I don't want to go into too many details about the project here - it's an unusual project that would be fairly easy to identify if I did - or about the university where I'll be working, although I don't think it'll give much away to say that their HR department could possibly get things moving re: contracts in a more timely and efficient manner than it's doing at the moment. Because, really, unless I'm holding that contract, I'm still not going to believe this is true.

I had a dream about a job interview in which:

a) one of my friends, it turned out, had an interview for the same position, except his was at eleven in the morning and mine was half-past five and that meant they were interviewing all day and oh my God I'm up against about fifteen other people and the panel will be so fed up by the time they get to me;
b) I had nothing to wear! Specifically, nothing that would go with a skirt which I wouldn't wear to an interview anyway in real life. (I have an interview suit. It might well not fit now.) And it took me from 11 till 5 to find a top to go with the skirt;
c) Just as they were about to call me into the interview room, some strange mutated monsters (think Predators) rose up to threaten people the world over, and humanity was evacuated into space.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Yes, yes I have. Here's what I've got done so far today:

- One library shift, featuring actual work getting actually done!
- The last last absolute last work I have to do for the first-year essay grades (except for the thing I have to do tomorrow morning, because ARGH)
- Sorted out a list of final Things I Need To Do to an article that's currently leaping its way towards publication like a salmon trying to return to the place of its birth (and there are bears at the top of the waterfalls, oh yes there are)
- A lot of scanning for one of my other jobs. A lot of scanning. The scanners are temperamental, and only one in three attempts to scan a page actually worked, meaning I also did a lot of deleting (also: the OCR program we use for this tells you, when you select 'Delete Current Page', that 'This will delete the current page! Are you sure you want to do this?).

And I was going to do some preliminary investigation work on a postdoc proposal my head of department wants to hear about, but this involved trying to work out how Bizarre Arcane Funding System works so I gave up, because it is now half-past eight and anyway I think understanding that one involves sacrificing a goat and reading things into its entrails, and I do not have a goat.

I just marked 86 undergraduate essays in six days. Six days, ladies and gentlemen, and six days which included four library shifts, a job application and a Christmas party at that. My department so owes me a puppy.

And with the self-congratulations over my time management abilities out of the way, here's what I actually wanted to say: God, I am terrible at time management. Really really bad at it. I have a lot of experience at doing seventeen things at once (advice: if you are a PhD student, and you already have three jobs, and someone offers you another one working on organising a conference, the answer is 'HELL NO' and not 'Will there be wine?'. Actually, no - the answer is 'Will you help me talk one of my other bosses into taking leave from that job?', because the conference will be better, but you will be so busy. Make sure there's wine, too), so I can mostly get everything done on time, but that's not quite the same as being good at getting everything done on time. And this, I don't think I'm any good at.

I procrastinate, and then I panic. That's it, basically. That's what I do. It got stuff done when I was an undergraduate, and it got me through my PhD, but I'm not a student any more! And if I have to do things like marking 86 essays in six days, I at least want to be able to do so in such a way that I don't feel like I'm ditching all my friends and putting my life on pause in order to Get The Work Done, because earlier on the afternoon when I could have got some of the work done I was watching Battlestar Galactica, and now I'll feel guilty if I spend any of my time doing or thinking about anything other than work.

Yeah, and I haven't even seen the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica yet. People, I am procrastinating from my procrastination. What the hell.

All right, so here's the problem: I can't tell whether I'm just bad at time management, or whether my belief that I'm bad at time management cripples my ability to manage my time by including anything other than work in it. Effectively, I suppose the two are the same, and one of these days I probably am going to raise my head from a stack of undergraduate essays I'm marking on a library shift to find that two of my other bosses have fired me, my friends have all dropped me and written a tell-all confessional bestseller about the experience ('Reply to your emails RIGHT NOW or I'll assume you are dead in a ditch!': The September Blue Story), and my boyfriend's left me for a voice-activated Dalek, and I still haven't done the dishes. It's probably the second one, to be honest. And that was a great mindset for getting me through a PhD; it's just not helping me now. So, new semester's resolution, I am Working On It.

I gave up guilt for Lent once. Did I mention that? I really did, and that was during the PhD and everything. I can provide a detailed theological justification for it, too But, wow. Difficult.

Actually, you know what I really need to do? I need to sleep.

First line(s) from the books on one of my shelves, selected entirely randomly. (This is only counting the books you can see; my bookshelves runneth over.)

1. Perhaps it was merely the book she was reading, but Sarah Petursson felt uneasy.
2. London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.
3. He was lost. He wasn't used to being lost. He was the kind of man who drew up plans and executed them, but now everything was conspiring against him in ways he decided he couldn't have foreseen.
4. The ice was thin and loosely attached to the rock. I could see water streaming beneath the opaque layer undermining its strength.
5. Behold! I am not one that goes to Lectures or the pow-wow of Professors.
6. It is quite true that I wasn't doing anything that morning except looking at a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter and thinking about writing a letter. It is also quite true that I don't have a great deal to do any morning. But that is no reason why I should have to go out hunting for old Mrs. Penruddock's pearl necklace. I don't happen to be a policeman.
7. 'Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows', Sam Clemens said. 'I can't say that the sleeping is very restful.'
8. The Animal Tales collected in this group of folk narratives are not animal anecdotes, nor tales of magical animals such as we find in the Fairy Tales.
9. It was on a mild, fragrant evening in late September, several weeks after she had moved to Glenkill, Pennsylvania, to begin teaching at the Glenkill Academy for Boys, that Monica Jensen was introduced to Sheila Trask at a crowded reception in the headmaster's residence.
10. At first, the damage didn't look quite that bad. There was a jagged crack running through the front door's glass, but that could have happened in a hundred innocent ways.
11. When the big man came in, there was a movement in the room like a lot of bird dogs pointing. Piano player quits pounding, the two singing drunks shut up, all the beautiful people with cocktails in their hands stop talking and laughing.
12. Imagine for a moment that, once Spectre had been safely defeated by Sean Connery, they turned the set of You Only Live Twice into a theme park - with a sliding roof over an artificial beach. Imagine they also put in a wave machine and heated the whole thing up to a steady 30 degrees centigrade.
13. Derek Strange got down in a three-point stance. He breathed evenly, as his father had instructed him to do, and took in the pleasant smell of April.
14. I leave these verses as they stand, although they contain innumerable examples of what I now see to be errors of literature, and one or two examples of what I have come to think errors of opinion.
15. It was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell if his liver was out of order. I had them all.
16. The ideological roots of Socialist feminism lay in the popular democratic tradition of the late eighteenth century, and in particular in the radical egalitarianism of the 1790s.
17. And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it.
18. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
19. When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them.
20. Observe now your own epoch of history as it appears to the Last Men.
21. Light came through the window, trickling morning all over the room. Tatiana Metanova slept the sleep of the innocent, the sleep of restless joy, of warm, white Leningrad nights, of jasmine June.
22. Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
23. "We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.

One of my former students comes up to the desk with a stack of books. Smart student, lots of books, and we're talking about the courses he's taking when he suddenly points at an old hardback and squeals.

Me: You what?
Him: Look, look, it's Beckett!

And indeed it is: the hardback book on Samuel Beckett he's pointing at has an image of Beckett's face stamped into the cover, the kind you can just see at an angle when the light catches it.

Me: Nifty.
Him: Wow. I didn't even see that! That's amazing!
Me: At least you noticed it now and not at three in the morning when you were writing the Beckett essay.
Him: Or when I came home late drunk. I'd have woken up all my flatmates.
Me: Heh.
Him: "EVERYBODY! JESUS IS ON MY BOOK!"

A Student I Have Not Only Never Taught But In Fact Have Never Even Seen Before: Hi! Um, wait, wait - hi. Um, can I tell you something?
Me: Yes?
Student: I stole a sandwich off the buffet table over there yesterday and I feel really bad. It was one of those little triangle ones? You know, the pointy ones? Like this? *bending his hand into a triangle shape*
Me: It's... okay, really, I don't think anyone cares that much.
Student: But I feel so BAD.
Me: Well, you can say ten Hail Marys if you want, but really nobody minds one sandwich.
Student: It's fine?
Me: It's fine.
Student: Great! *indicating the post-barrier dividing the hall into four* Can I borrow one of these post things?

WHAT?

Dear Professor So-and-so,

I am writing to apply for the lectureship in something vaguely close to my field, currently advertised on jobs.ac.uk. While I know you’re going to get several hundred applicants for this one alone, you should hire me ahead of all those people, and I’ll tell you why.

First, my research. I don’t exactly have a lot of time to work on this these days, what with the four jobs I’m juggling to pay the rent and the arrival of a computer that can actually play Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, but I’m still fairly good at it. They gave me a PhD and everything. I have some fancy-looking conference presentations on my c.v., and nobody ever falls asleep during mine, I promise you. Also, this really swanky journal just accepted one of my articles. And I have plans! Oh, I have plans. Great plans, wonderful plans, monograph-worthy plans. I can tell you all about them at an interview, or while weeping bitterly into a gin and tonic at closing time, whatever works for you. If you’re at all unsure about my ability to juggle teaching, research and administrative work in a new job, please bear in mind that I mostly finished my PhD thesis on the library circulation desk after teaching to the point of exhaustion all day. Pay me enough to spend all my library time actually reading the books, and I promise you I’ll bring in so many publications that they’ll create a whole new RAE/REF classification of ‘awesome’ just for your department.

Second, my teaching. I’ve taught everything from first-year introductory courses (‘Books and You: Don’t be afraid!’) to final-year honours classes, and everyone from precocious Foucault-reading school-leavers to sullen forty-year-olds with authority issues (and vice versa). I’ve taught tutorials, written lectures, put course handbooks together, refereed student flamewars on WebCT, and right now I’m supervising the dissertation of a student who chose her theoretical approach based on the nifty structure of a course I ran a couple of years ago. I KNOW! Anyway, being a hiring committee you’re no doubt going to hear a lot of bullshit about how people find the huge first-year classes so very rewarding and totally inspiring and not at all below their true station in academic life, so I won’t bore you with the Dead Poets Society spiel, but I will tell you that I mean what I say. If you want to hire someone who’s going to view their career path as one long march towards teaching a single postgraduate class in psychoanalytic representations of the (m)other in illustrated children’s poetry, 1921-1927, then go ahead and hire the twitchy-looking person who just used the word ‘rewarding’; if you want someone who can and will happily teach your first-years, hire me.

Thirdly, my ability to play nicely with other children. Okay, take a look around your department. You have PhD students? You have a PhD student who always turns up to help with all the boring department tasks like clearing up after parties, who’s always there to fill in seats any time the ‘we look bad, get down here now’ mass e-mail goes around about poor staff attendance at department seminars, who will never cause you heartache? That was me. Admittedly, by now I think my department would pay you to take me away, but the fact that I coped so quietly and so sweetly for so long in a department that can simultaneously complain about PhD students not showing any kind of interest in the running of the department and about TAs having the temerity to speak during department meetings remains a mark in my favour, I think. Also, I’ve worked on a bunch of conferences, can make it across a whole building in 1.2 seconds with a data projector under one arm, am adept at the kind of networking that involves juggling comments like “Let me introduce you to someone who might be interested in that project” with comments like “And your wife doesn’t understand you, right?” at the same event, got the administration to Do Something about various things, and resisted the urge to punch someone in the throat for telling me, while I was doing four jobs and a PhD, that these would be the best days of my academic life because all I had to think about was my thesis. Also, I take up very little space and don’t mind having an office without a window.

Yours in begging, pleading, get-me-out-of-this-dysfunctional-snakepit despair,

September Blue.