Last December

A rant, a cautionary tale.

I got my job at Tiny Greek University because of an earlier act of sheer bravado. The semester before The Job, I taught two classes for TGU. Twice a week, I commuted an hour, taught back-to-back two-hour classes from eight until noon, held an hour of office hours, and commuted back to Altville just in time to attend classes in the final seminar required for my Ph.D. coursework.

Apparently my performance was good enough -- or was at least enough competent -- that when someone vacated a term position (to take a t-t job) they thought of me. At the time it was mid July. And I was teaching at BMU in an intensive summer program when I got the call. Obviously, I accepted The Job. (How could I not?) The upshot was I had to prepare my courses in about three weeks while also teaching in this summer "boot camp," and I also had to extricate myself from my fall commitments to BMU. Everybody was really nice about it, but it was still an awkward thing to have to do.

1.5 weeks after the summer thing was over I reported for duty at TGU. And everything was sunshine and light. I replaced my falling-apart car that occasionally wouldn't start with a shiny new hatchback. I bought a few new clothes. I attended orientation in a kind of blissful excitement, knowing it would be hard, but so pleased that for once in my entire life I DIDN'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT MONEY. This was literally the first time in my life I had ever felt like that.

And things were better and better. For some months, let's call them September through November, the faculty at TGU were super welcoming and helpful. The chair of the department called me in one day and asked if I'd be interested in continuing to work next year. (That is, the year that has become this one.) Enrollment was high and they would definitely need more bodies to cover the classes. And I have (as I have mentioned) oodles of experience in all kinds of classes. NO GUARANTEES, of course, he hastened to add, but he'd certainly like to take advantage of my experience! Altogether, I was still feeling good.

Now we arrive at last December. Three things happened:


One: The chair stopped returning my e-mails as promptly and stopped meeting my eyes. Finally at the December faculty meeting he admitted to all and sundry: the dean of finance says no more adjuncts. Which is a good thing in a general way, but a bad thing when it means that class sizes will go up because there aren't enough tenured faculty to cover all the slots.

I started to notice, then, how fractured the department actually was. Between the "old" people who'd been there 20 years and the "new." Between the "creative writers" and the "lit professors." Suspicion, gossip behind backs, and everyone tired, tired, tired because the teaching and committee load at TGU is heavy and students expect in addition a lot of faculty face time.

Okay, fine, no more teaching next year. Which is good because I'm already getting kind of tired with this commuting every single day and I need to get back to the Ph.D. I was more uneasy, but I still felt okay.


Two: Except then I got a call from Accounting. Could I come in to the office? To talk about an issue with my paycheck? I could, because the alternative was grading.

You know it's bad when the first thing the woman you're meeting with says is, "Okay, don't cry."

(About which: I get, lady, that you felt bad for me. And that you realized that your office had REALLY FUCKED ME OVER in a way that might upset a reasonable person. But the "don't cry"? That was just selfish. Dude, think about what you were telling me. Although I didn't feel like crying. I felt like making sarcastic bitter comments and maybe throwing a stapler but I didn't do that either. Because when all is said and done I felt bad for YOU for having to tell me this news and when it comes down to it I AM A THOUGHTFUL PERSON WHO RESPONDS TO THE DISCOMFORT OF OTHERS.)

The issue was that, oops! They accidentally were paying me too much. It seems I was entered into the system as a student, and that this means that they weren't removing FICA. (FICA? What the hell is FICA? Apparently it's some kind of EXTRA, ADDITIONAL tax that students don't have to pay but that real adults do.) So I owed them $300/each for all the paychecks I'd already gotten. How embarassing! And we could take care of this issue if I could just forfeit my December paycheck?

Uhm, I have rent to pay? Also bills? So no I can't. Okay, then, she said. Here's what we can do for you! I've arranged it so that we can give you a loan for your December paycheck. Then next semester, you can pay us back for the loan, and also we will start taking out the FICA.

The upshot of all this, she told me, is that from now on my paychecks would be $600 smaller.

In my world, $600 is HUGE. It's, like, rent plus half a car payment. And, whether the money was "mine" to begin with or not, I had made a budget for the year based on the paychecks I was getting. So yeah, I maybe bought a coat or some velvet trousers that I wouldn't have bought if I'd known.

But the thing about the timing of these events was that they became a one-two punch, a double whammy. One, you won't be hired back next year. Two, you won't be getting as much money next semester, and so while you will obviously still be able HANDILY to cover your bills for now, you won't be able to put money into savings, meaning you won't leave this year with that nice financial cushion your little heart had so desired.


Three: So here I was, at semester's end, with no future job, no ability to save against a rainy day, and miles and miles and miles of papers to grade. Because I was teaching not one or two but THREE writing intensive classes, and like a fool I'd assigned four papers in each -- because I thought that was a good, effective course design. And obviously by the time Thanksgiving rolled around the drafts were coming in hot and heavy and I was starting to feel like a fool for having given myself all that grading.

It's around this time that something went ~pop!~ Something grading related. Because it TOTALLY DIDN'T MATTER what I did at my job, as long as I showed up and went through the motions. I could do the worst job in the world and it wouldn't matter, because I already had been given a termination date. I could kill myself doing the best job in the world and it totally wouldn't matter, because I had already been given a termination date. (Also, my paychecks were shrinking so why the hell would I bother?)

Nihilism ensued. Also a round of crying on my floor and an intense episode of gastritis that finally sent me scurrying to the phone to line up some meds and a therapist. At which point I encountered totally frustrating thing # 1,347 which is that my health insurance, which bragged on its nationwide network, featured nearly no providers in Altville: something to do with Altville providers banding together against the Big Bad Network. When I finally located a therapist who would take my insurance, he was a dear calm man who taught me a lot about breathing and who reminded me a tiny bit of my father, only older. There was no way I could confess to him all that was up, all the murderous laziness and the agonized rebellion and flat-out refusal to grade anything except for EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE.

Now, a few words. Obviously my performance on the job mattered somewhat, because I cared about my students, and because I still needed to milk the place for rec letters and student evaluations. But I already knew from whom I could get decent rec letters, and while my student evaluations are rarely stellar they're usually decent and in this case I had a couple of courses that scored pretty high. Or at least high enough to include in my teaching portfolio. So that didn't matter. The other thing was that Tiny Greek University DID end up having to open a new adjunct line of funding, but because it was a new line they had to run a national search, blah blah blah, and while I applied and while I made the "semifinal round" I didn't get invited for a "campus interview" because I don't actually have a Ph.D. Nor have I actually done my exams. I've been too busy, you know, trying to do my civic duties like teaching and attending committee meetings. AND DROPPING MY PH.D. PROGRESS TO COME BAIL YOUR SORRY ASSES OUT WHEN YOU NEEDED HELP AT THE LAST MINUTE, YOU HEARTLESS FUCKS.

And all of it was totally unrelated to my performance. But of course it FELT like it was. LIke, if only I'd been BETTER during that first semester, they would have had to hire me back!

I'm pretty sure this is wrong because, first of all, I did the job to the best of my ability (up until the end when I gave up in defeat and cancelled the final in my class just so I wouldn't have to grade it). Second, unlike the new t-t hire, I got no course release, I was commuting, and other teachers knowing that I was teaching THREE intensive writing classes said to me I-don't-know-how-you-do-it.

But I still felt bad about it.

My last semester there, I got a sweet course load. I got to teach creative writing. (I heard there was snark among the creative writing faculty until a champion of mine pulled them aside and said SHE HAS AN MFA. AND SHE IS A TERRIFIC WRITER. SO SHUT UP ABOUT IT -- they apparently thought I was just some lit hack.) I got to design a cool topics course. And yet I still couldn't muster the excitement about it I would have liked. Oh, I loved designing and teaching those courses. But I was already weary and around the bend and let class prep slide. And my grading ability had gone ~pop!~ I made it to school, taught my classes, med with students. In the evenings, I wanted nothing but to watch Law and Order for hours and hours. Which worked out, because one of the local networks ran Law and Order for hours and hours.

Is it possible for a job to really fuck you up? Because I think mine did.

And now it is December again. Business Model University has no teaching for me next semester and I hate my correspondence classes. They are "easy money" but they are maybe killing me. (UPDATE: Except -- yay! I think I'll just get rid of them.) Would it be really stupid to just have a part time non-academic gig (I have one lined up, about which more later!) and take out yet again a bit of student loans to get me by? While I maybe actually write my exam proposal and read my books that I've been avoiding while I've been preoccupied by not grading?

The more I do it, blogging's really fun.