Spite and Malice

My general distaste for work has turned into an active dislike of my place of employment. No longer do I dread my alarm going off strictly because I'd rather go back to bed than spend half my day at work or commuting there.

No, now I'm beginning to sense feelings of hatred.

I can't quite say why this is the case. It doesn't seem that any single thing at work pushed me over that edge today. (In fact, I can't really remember what I did today; I just know that whatever it was, it wasn't terribly important.)

But it's more the accumulation of more general feelings and inclinations.

To wit: when I started I thought I was doing something interesting and important, valuable and useful, noble and admirable. The thought of working to collect and preserve oral histories, particularly of the more popular variety, was the sort of thing that made me want to go boast about my job to everyone. I mean, this was the sort of thing in which I could take pride. But then, when I started I thought lots of things, none of which have panned out in actuality.

Like that I'd only be working 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Or that having to spend nine and a half hours at work meant getting a really long lunch break. Or that I'd be using my talents.

I could deal with the long hours for not-so-much pay (I'm basically making a little more than $13 an hour, assuming you base my salary on working nine hours a day, rather than the 10 or more I work more often), or even not putting my skills to good use, so long as I continued to feel like I was making sacrifices for a worthwhile endeavor. But I can't delude myself about that anymore.

My gut feeling, which seems right on matters like this more often than not, is that I'm squandering my precious time and energy on this project. It's certainly the sort of mission that seems good and noble, the kind that inspires well-to-do liberals and the like to reach for their checkbooks. Having seen the day-to-day operation of the organization and developed a vibe for the office environment and personality of the executive director, it seems like that's the real mission. Not preserving vital stories for future generations to hear. It's organizational inertia, a particularly common and debilitating ailment that afflicts many nonprofits.

This is the sort of thing that leads to sloppiness, to waste. Instead of doing it out of idealism or enthusiasm, we seem to work only to please the corporate sponsors and other impressive folks. This leads to great feats of ridiculosity. Like our executive director taking the title, undoubtedly self-appointed, of "public historian."

Public historian?!? What the hell is that? It makes no sense. The great, legendary Chicago journalist and voice of the people Studs Terkel is a public historian. He's the only one who comes to my mind. And by definition, he's too modest to call himself such. Nothing screams pretensiousness like a title that utterly ludicrous and meaningless. Not only is our executive director nothing like Studs Terkel, she doesn't appear to do anything that would remotely qualify her as a historian. No one in the office really does. Us writers? We're glorified journalists. Nothing more. Argh.

Perhaps the straw that broke my back today, though, was when she was telling me what I'll be doing through next week, namely working media outlets to publicize our fundraiser. When I asked her what I should do if someone wants a credential to cover the event, she said it was fine, though she was "elitist" about it. Meaning that The New York Times or Chicago Tribune could send a legion of reporters and it wouldn't be a problem. But if a lesser paper, the kind she obviously looks down at, something like, say, The Daily Northwestern wanted to send one lowly reporter to cover it, they'd get shut out. This despite the fact that last year at the news conference before the event, there was exactly one working journalist in attendance; the rest of the crowd assembled were journalism students from Northwestern. Unbelievable.

You see, people?! You see what I have to tolerate?!

Dispensed

It seems my intuition is keen.

Previously in comments about my job, I noted that I expected my boss to ultimately pick the other writer, Edward, to stay on permanently after the month and fill the permanent position.

That is, if they took anyone on permanently. Having seen the way the organization is run, it doesn't seem their style to actually have permanent employees to keep up with the work load as it comes, instead of maintaining a bare bones staff and then hiring a bunch of temps to attempt to tackle the mountain of work that builds up shortly before it all needs completing.

But as I mentioned before, in the event they managed not to be tightwads and actually paid for either of us to work beyond the end of the month, I figured they'd keep Edward. He's been there slightly longer, but mainly it seemed almost like he was being groomed to stick around, whereas I seem to be such the cheap labor, the run-of-the-mill hired hand, the spare part.

Anyway, today I happened to be over by Edward's desk, checking to see how far along he was with one of the tasks we were working on, when I caught a glimpse of a vacation request sheet, with dates in November and December on it. Hmm. That's odd. I thought we were just working till the end of the month since this was a short-term position. Think Edward knows something I don't know? Yeah, I'm not really pleased with this.

It's not that I have anything against Edward or don't think he's qualified. He sees eminently capable of doing the job. And I'm certainly not terribly upset that I won't have to work there anymore. From my perspective, the only bad part about it is not getting a paycheck anymore.

But really irks me is the whole process involved in this. Namely, that I don't believe I ever had a chance to get the job. For all I know, they hired me fully expecting to give it to Edward. But instead of being frank with me and saying that it was definitely short-term, they misled me and gave me the impression that I could actually be retained. And they deceived me simply to try to get me to work beyond 6 p.m. and do all sorts of crap that I'm not required to do and would be unreasonable to expect me to do. Argh.

At the very least, I've gained some valuable experience. Less of the sort I can tout on my resume and more in the way of learning how to assess an office dynamic from the outset, and how to ask questions about that in an interview before being thrust into a miserable situation. I hate being jerked around like this by employers. It sucks because it makes my job and my life miserable, and also squanders my myriad talents and skills.

But, I've also gained from this the knowledge that I want nothing more than to go back to school, to go ahead with my plans to get a doctorate in history and pursue a life cloistered in the ivory towers of academia. In all seriousness, I had been a little worried over the past few months that I would find a job and like it so much that I wouldn't want to leave it to go back to school. Nope. That's not going to be a problem. In-sha-a'Stanford I'll get into the grad school of my dreams next fall and will only have to work in the interim to pay bills and save enough money to move back to California.

Someone, I don't remember whom, said you should only go to grad school if you can't see yourself doing anything else. And that's definitely where I am now. I can't bear the thought of working this job another two weeks, let alone the rest of the year or my life.

Academia just really seems to suit me. I'm had some anxiety about it, mainly as I've inched closer to completely committing myself to that path. But as I've had some experiences that really tested my interest, whether it be taking a research trip to work in archives or to take a job in the "real world," and each time I've come away feeling more certain than ever that I want to be a professor of Eastern European history. So now on to getting into grad school . . . .

Ponderings

So voters in my home state opted to replace the robotic Gov. Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who has spent the better part of his career as an action star playing cyborgs?!?!

Work sucks. More specifically, working nine- and 10-hour days bites. Mercifully, our deadline to have all 290-odd bios written, edited and submitted is the end of tomorrow, and we only have four bios to write and 91 to edit. That sounds like a lot, but considering that there are two people working on it and it takes all of five minutes to edit a bio, I anticipate finishing the task in the afternoon, meaning we shouldn't need to stay past quitting time, and with any luck will get out early. It remains to be seen what fun chores they'll reassign us to following this one, but I hope it doesn't entail spending long, late hours doing it. Let's hope not.

Let's also hope I find another job. This one ends at month's end, and while there's the possibility that one of us will get retained permanently, I'm thinking it's pretty doubtful. For one, I think Edward, the other writer, is a lot more likely to get retained, simply because he's been doing it longer (OK, two weeks longer), seems to know the ins and outs more (mainly because he's been here longer, and no one has seen fit to clue me in on things), probably fits their mold better (by which I mean he's always wearing a dress shirt, slacks and dress shoes to my flannel shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, and also tends to stay longer beyond the supposed quitting time of 6 p.m.), etc.

More importantly, I don't particularly want to stick around beyond the end of the month. Commuting an hour each way (it'd be much shorter if the CTA were at all reliable or consistent), getting home after dark, eating dinner past 8, having maybe three or four hours to unwind at home before bed each night -- it's just not my kind of life.