Instead, we’re supposed to send jobs to the big office downstairs with all the industrial photocopiers. We can pick up the copies a couple of days later. Obviously, that won’t work for me, as I have already expressed my lack of a desire to do any advance planning of the courses that I am teaching.

So I make copies on the department machine while no one is looking. I will keep doing it until the photocopy police take me away in cuffs.  One day I had to jump the subway turnstile (because the ticket reader was busted) right before coming to work and making illegal copies.

I was a bad, bad girl on that day.

I am determined not to adjunct again after this semester. Did I mention that? Possibly I will teach one evening class, which will allow me to look for, you know, a job.  But I’ve said that before. I’m hoping it’s true this time.

My family has stopped asking how the academic job market is going. Sort of. My SO was visiting a relative the other day, and she asked him if I wasn’t throwing in the towel too soon: “Surely, if she just keeps applying!” So, people have stopped asking me, but they are still asking my SO if I am not just a little crazy to give up such a wonderful career as a Professor. Pretty soon, they’ll stop asking him and move on to those outside my circle. My mom will come for a visit, stop the postman delivering my mail and ask, “Have you heard my daughter talk about any plans to get a job at a university?”

That could totally happen.

You know what else could happen? Revolution. I’m getting involved in a group on campus that is trying to organize a labor action against the university. There are a zillion adjuncts. We could do a lot if we did it together. It has to be handled very carefully because the Taylor Law in New York State makes it illegal for public workers to strike. So if you just stop coming to class as an individual, either out of spite or because you just don’t feel like teaching that day, it’s fine. But if you declare, as a group of adjuncts, that you won’t come to work as a form of protest, well it’s the jailhouse for you, sister!

I’m not too worried about breaking the Taylor law. Isn’t that the point of a strike, to do something you’re not supposed to do?

Some adjuncts want to work on the campaign, but they are a little skittish about getting found out by their department Chairs. They are afraid of losing their fellowship (if they’re students) or just getting fired outright.

I have not a single fear in that regard. I don’t know why. Maybe my relatives are right and I am a little crazy. Or maybe it’s that, though I despise adjuncting, I have learned something from the students I teach.

I’m teaching a class of students who want to be professors or teachers. English teachers. What a crazy dream is that in times like these! They’re wonderful people. They deserve far more than the paltry amount of time I can give to them.

They don’t seem to know or care that there aren’t many jobs in higher ed, and K-12 is being gutted as well, what with Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind in the process of destroying the 400-year history of the American Common School. Not that that history was all grand all the time or anything. Some African Americans in pre-civil rights Mississippi might have something to say about that.

Anyway, I look out over my classroom of students (mostly women) who want to be English teachers. Like me, I presume, though they don’t know that I am not a real teacher at all, but a temporary stand-in for the professor who should be there – who would be there – instead.

I’m not going to use my classroom as a forum for speeches about how screwed up education is in this country, about how it’s been taken over by technocrats who’ve never taught a day in their lives, or about how Wall Street bankers, who see a vast untapped market in public education, are vulturing in for the kill.

I won’t say any of that. But what I will do is help organize the adjuncts at my college without fear or shame. I don’t care if the bosses know. They can throw me in the slammer. The students, who have chosen to study Humanities despite everything, have made me quite unafraid.

Against the backdrop of tales of women’s heroics, there are of course the anti-feminists who blame it all on the fact that no man was there to pull a Flight 92. Then there are the more thoughtful notes. Djuna’s comment on my last post is one of them. I am pasting it here without comment for now.

While it isn’t exactly the focus of your post the fact that you share an office with all women, implying that the majority of adjuncts you work with are women (?), seems significant to me. I can’t help but wonder if the majority of adjuncts in the US in general are women? Maybe you’ve posted before on this angle of the issue but I feel like it’s one that’s generally ignored. Not directly related to what you’ve written here at all, but it’s been perplexing reading the recent news stories about the horrific murder of 6 women teachers and 20 children in Connecticut and the angle the media has taken on the deaths of the women. Their murders seem to be reported as “sacrifices,” i.e., they sacrificed their lives to protect the lives of their children, and now this line is being used to argue against cutting jobs for teachers because they apparently lay down their lives for little children despite not getting paid very much or offered much in terms of respect for their labor. Perhaps all of this is completely unrelated but I can’t help but wonder at the connections between the adjunct labor issue and the patriarchal system that structures the way we measure the worth of women’s work (and their lives) in general.

What I had intended to post today is on a related topic. I had another conversation with a would-be Humanities PhD student and it made me want to throw myself off a bridge in despair. Instead, I write.

In the last months, I have become friendly with one of the women (and they’re all women) with whom I share an office at my current adjuncting gig.

She told me some time ago that she was preparing to apply to the same program from which I graduated. She is interested in my field, and she’s about my age. So obviously we’re soul mates now.

I did not say anything about this grad school plan of hers at first. I vacillate between warning people right away or waiting for them to ask. Who am I to tell someone I just met what to do with her life?

Recently, she started complaining about all the bureaucratic stuff required for her application. I took that as an opening. I said, “are you sure this is the right decision for you?” I proceeded to tell her a little about my experience, my current situation, and about all the people I know in the same boat. In fact, I hardly know anyone not in that boat. It’s a heavy boat. And it’s taking on water.

Immediately, upon hearing that I have left academia after completing the program she wants to enter, she gave me a pep talk. “You have to go back on the market. Don’t give up!”

Good grief.

I know she’s trying to be nice, but why does everyone fall back on this standard response to life’s challenges? I felt as if I were talking to one of my students, many of whom write the same paper over and over again in every class: “things are tough for a while, but if you persevere, everything will work out and you’ll be a stronger person” blah blah blah.

I explained that I have no plans to return to academia. “I am just telling you to go in with your eyes open,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said, “I plan to apply for a 5-year fellowship. Then I can really take my time in the program.”

When she said this, I realized I was not talking to someone who is just stubborn or believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that she will beat the odds. Nor was I talking to someone who had done research and decided to ignore it.

No, I was speaking to a whole new species of Wanna-Be Academic: the person who has absolutely no clue about anything related to graduate school in the Humanities.

How was I to continue the conversation? What strategy would I choose?

I said, “five years? The time-to-degree is more like 9 years. That is true nationally and also in the program you are trying to enroll in.”

She blinked, unconvinced. “Really?”

“You will not finish the degree in five years. No one does, especially while teaching.” (Of course, I did not mention that most people who enter that program never finish at all  – ever.) “So,” I continued, “there’s a good chance that at the end of five years the money will run out and you will find yourself back here sharing this office with me.”

I tried to be serious/funny. Like, “isn’t it amusing that one could work for five years and end up back at the beginning? Doesn’t it make you want to cry?”

I also advised her to do some research. “Have you talked to anyone else who has been through the program or is currently enrolled?”

She admitted that she had not. Nevertheless, she dug in her heels. “I guess I am just convinced this is the right career for me. I just love teaching.”

I still can’t believe anyone thinks earning a PhD in a Humanities field is preparation for teaching. Nor can I fathom that anyone would take the path of grad school without doing at least a little Googling to find out things such as: how long do these programs generally take anyway?  Or, even better, what are people on the internets saying about getting a PhD these days?

Nope. Nothing. Our conversation was perfectly pleasant. I was extra careful not to lecture. But I advised her to do some research before diving in. She is very nice and seemed more concerned about me by the end of our conversation.

“It sounds like you’re burned out,” she said sympathetically.

That comment made me a little angry. For the record, I am not burned out. I have never been less burned out in my entire life.

Frankly, I was offended to have my experience dismissed as a case of simple burn out, like a week in the country would cure me. If I were an accountant talking about the terrible job market for accountants, no one would call me burned out. Yet, somehow, a post-academic can’t be trusted to know what’s up.

Now that I have written all of the above, I feel guilty for saying these things about my friendly office mate. The job market is not her fault. Still, I hope she doesn’t get into the program. I really don’t.

Once again, the East Coast is recovering (barely) from a major hurricane. Sandy was far, far worse than Irene, last year’s superstorm. At least thirty-eight have died in NYC and millions have been displaced. Some have lost everything. Seems like we’re getting one of these unprecedented storms every couple of years. We’re going to have to stop calling these monsters “hundred-year storms” and refer to them as “last week’s storm.”

I am one of the lucky ones. I live on a hill and was spared the worst. In fact, my SO and I never lost power, which is why we are hosting some Sandy refugees from the blackout zone this week.

As I listened to the raging wind and rain outside on Sunday and Monday, fearing that the windows would explode at any moment, it occurred to me that Superstorm Sandy and the adjunct crisis in higher education have a lot in common. They both have their roots in neoliberal capitalism that reduces everything to the profit motive, destroying our ecosystem in the process.

We constantly hear that, to have a healthy economy, we must promote growth. Politicians from both parties say this again and again. Industries need to expand so more jobs are created and more people will have money to buy the stuff that corporations are selling. Companies will then have to hire more people to make the stuff that people are buying. And the cycle continues.

The problem is that the growth imperative increases carbon emissions and depletes natural resources, contributing to global climate change. Warmer oceans and higher seas mean bigger storms.

As Pat Thomas wrote last year in Alternet:

“The mantra of ‘growth’ has become a kind of mental monoculture. Many businesspeople and economists can’t see any other point of view and don’t really want to. And yet every argument that we make in favour of growth falls down at the feet of one simple fact: the resources upon which growth depend are running out. ”

What’s the connection to education and the adjunct crisis? The exploitation of adjuncts is an effect of the ideology of infinite growth. As Andrew Ross recently wrote in Dissent:

“Salaries of full-time faculty have been stagnant for a long time, and the massive conversion of tenure track jobs into contingent positions (more than two-thirds of professors are now off the tenure track) has sliced the teaching payroll at almost all institutions.”

The culprit, according to Ross, is “expansionary growth” in which every public good or resource must be crushed under the churning wheels of the we-need-more-stuff machine. As more and more classes are staffed by adjuncts at lower rates of pay, more and more buildings are sprouting up across American campuses. The College Where I Adjunct is building a multi-million dollar technology center a few blocks away. But the administration cries poverty when adjuncts ask for a raise. “Universities,” Ross explains, “have become a vital part of the urban growth machine.”

Colleges under the spell of the growth imperative care more about new buildings and higher enrollments than about fair employment practices or quality teaching. They care more about growth than they do about fulfilling some old fuddy-duddy mission to educate the public. In fact, these days, if a college isn’t growing or expanding, no other measure counts.

That kind of thinking makes teachers an exploitable resource – another thing to be used up and thrown out.

We weren’t ready for Sandy because we haven’t yet begun to acknowledge that we’re growing and expanding ourselves out of existence. Likewise, those occupying (disappearing) privileged positions in the university aren’t any more knowledgeable about how bad things have gotten in the basement of the academy.

I was observed in the classroom last week, two days before the storm hit, by a long-tenured professor. She has no idea what life is like for me and the dozens of other adjuncts who teach in her department. Yet, that didn’t stop her from advertising her ignorance.

“I was an adjunct once myself!” she beamed. “We have to look out for each other. We’re a sisterhood.”

No, I am not joking. A professor, tenured for decades, actually said this. To my face.

I wanted to say, “Fuck you. We’re not sisters.”

But I just smiled, as is the post-academic’s way.

It’s this kind of denial, this complete and blatant misunderstanding of the facts, that makes me think the whole system needs to be overthrown. Reforms aren’t going to do. This refusal to see the obvious also prevents us from addressing the growth imperative that fuels climate change and Superstorms like Sandy.

Want more good jobs for college teachers? Want to save the Earth? Like some smart people once said,

“All Our Grievances Are Connected.”

We had a nice chat about what I’ve been up to and local politics and the various stresses that she experiences as the Chair of some committee or other. It was just two girls talking.

Until…the questioning that I suspected would come (but still hadn’t prepared for) began.

“Have you been trying to publish your dissertation?”

Hmmm. Let’s think about this for a moment, have I been trying to publish my dissertation?

“Uh, well,” the words were all jumbled in my mouth. “I, uh, sent off a couple of proposals two years ago. I got some interest, but, you know, it’s a long story and I, uh, not sure now, uhhhhh.”

It was something like that. I can’t speak well in conversations in which I know that the other person thinks that if I just did something more, that if I just did the right things in the right order, I would be where she is in a few years: pulling in a full-time salary and benefits and chairing some worthless committee.

She was perplexed at my non-answer. She furrowed her brow. “What’s your diss about again?”

I was stumped. I said some words in response, but I could not remember in that moment what my dissertation is actually about. I’ve pondered the question in the days since and, honestly, I only have a vague idea even now. Her question reminded me, yet again, of the dominant mode of thinking about academia among academics: that if you don’t have a job you obviously want one and must still be hoping to get one, no matter how long you’ve been out of the game.

The conversation also reminded me of that time I was in junior high and my mom was getting on my case because I did so badly in Math. She was afraid I wouldn’t get into a good college or whatever, and she said sternly, “you could do better in Math if you wanted, but you just don’t care about it!”

Now, back then, my mother was making an accusation. But in the years since I have seen her statement less as an accusation and more as a description that is quite accurate. I am invested and committed to things that I care about. Other stuff? I can’t even remember it exists. My SO always tells me that I know what’s happening on all the really good TV shows, but I can’t keep the main plotlines straight on the bad ones: “wait, who is that teenage vampire sleeping with again?”

Anyway, my coffee companion continued to question me about my attempts at publication and what had happened and where I left things. She said, “I know someone at [such and such] publishing house, so why don’t you send me your proposal and I will send it to my friend?”

Why didn’t I just say no? I don’t want to publish that book. I have no interest. I do not care about it. I’d have to revise it to include all the literature from the last 2-3 years. Good grief. The thought of having to do scholarly work in my (former) field while adjuncting, making coffee for corporate executives, and hoping that it all eventually comes to something is about as appealing as sticking a fork in my eye.

But I was flummoxed, once again, at the disconnect between the views of full-time faculty and the real world. My former colleague was earnestly trying to help me. I wanted her to believe that the end of my career was just a glitch that would soon be corrected, even if I don’t believe it myself.

I still haven’t sent my dusty old book proposal to her. I probably won’t. It’s passive aggressive, I know. It strikes me that she, like many others, doesn’t connect the dots. She teaches at a university where there are hundreds of adjuncts. She supervises many of them. And, yet, she seemed kind of confused about the reason I don’t have a job. Frankly, it’s bizarre.

I have to memorize a speech for the next time (and there will always be a next time). I could say that I want to do other kinds of work now and engage different audiences. My dissertation was not a waste of time because I didn’t publish it. It sent me down a new path, one that, in the end, I’m grateful to have found.

Or, I could go the pithy route. It could go like this:

“I am no longer interested in pursuing an academic career or in conducting scholarly research because there are no jobs available, and I don’t believe that fact will ever change no matter what I do.”

Simple as that.

*On a related note, the most popular post on this blog by far, is  “How To Finish Your Dissertation When You Really Hate That Shit.” …. In case you too want to finish your dissertation and then find yourself, in a couple of years, unable to remember what it’s about.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe thesis statements and everything they stand for. In my own work, I refuse to write thesis statements or anything that resembles them. I sincerely believe that no piece of decent prose contains anything that might be mistaken for a thesis statement. Thesis statements and good writing are utterly incompatible.

Furthermore, I most certainly will never – no matter how emphatic the department grading rubric – advise my students to write thesis statements. Why? Because I choose to treat student writers like the intelligent people they are. And – to the degree that it is possible – I choose to teach writing in a manner that takes into consideration the way that good writing is actually produced. No writer ever claimed s/he came up with a rad thesis statement and then went on to build an awesome essay around it, just like her 8^th grade English teacher told her to do. I do not believe that such a scenario has ever occurred since the invention of the written word.

So why are students obsessed with thesis statements?

In my classes, most students have been told all their lives that they have to write thesis statements to write well. Most of them also had to pass some stupid writing test to graduate from high school. This is why they are traumatized. Even though I never mention thesis statements in class, students still ask me about them. They ask if they can “clear” their thesis statements with me before writing, as if I am an air traffic controller of the written word. In workshops, they advise each other to write better thesis statements and to include them in the first paragraph of every essay. Because that is where thesis statements live. Since I never utter the word, I marvel at how well the students police each other. They are haunted by the ghost of thesis statements past.

Here’s the thing about thesis statements that confuses me the most: what the fuck are they? A thesis is a sentence you’re supposed to put in your essay that states, unequivocally and without doubt, what your point is? Is that a practice we really want to encourage young people to engage in? Why would anyone who really cares about writing or thinking want to do that?  What about inquiry or exploration or – god forbid – figuring out what you are saying after you write something? What about the reality that writing is a messy, brutal business that no formula or series of rules could possibly prepare you for?

That brings me to the real reason I do not care for thesis statements. I despise them not only because they turn writing into a formula or a container for content, like a cement mixer of the mind. I also detest thesis statements because I strongly oppose the idea that we should aspire to know things for certain as either a consequence or a precondition of writing. It’s better to teach students – and to remind ourselves – to admire ambivalence and contradiction and to think of writing as a way to cultivate those things, not abolish them. That is what very good writing – a rare and beautiful thing – should be: a reflection of a commitment to knowing nothing at all and to writing forever into that void.

Meantime, I am teaching again! What is it like being back in the college classroom you ask? The first few sessions made me feel horrified and, at the same time, like I was in the right place. (Horrified In The Right Place is the name of the book I will never write on adjunct teaching.)

I’m supposed to be in the classroom, I thought to myself. Teaching is who I am.

I only felt this way for a second. Only for a brief moment did I allow myself to entertain the idea that the universe intends me to be a low-wage adjunct. I quickly stamped out the thought like Lady Macbeth out-outing the damn spot. First of all, the universe intends nothing. Secondly, I refuse to see part-time teaching as a calling. I do not accept that view of adjunct work anymore.

I will endeavor to be a decent teacher; it’s not the students’ fault and all that. But every time I feel a creeping sense of general commitment or purpose, I will stamp it out. It will take discipline, but I am a committed stamper.

What else can I tell you about?

I had a job interview! Yes! It was for a real-live, full-time job as a college administrator-type person! I applied for the job months ago, out of desperation and in a state of panic. But they called, so I went. The job didn’t seem that bad. I might even have liked it.

The thing is, I am ridiculously overqualified. They only asked for a B.A. degree on the job ad. So why did I apply?  And why did they call me?  I would say that only the universe knows, but the universe knows nothing.

I went into the process with an open mind, until I was asked the first question: “What qualifies you for this job?” I listed my qualifications. That was my mistake.

Rest assured I did not list my qualifications in an asshole-ish way. I know that I am not smarter than my potential colleagues; I do not know more than they, and I would not go into an interview (or any job) with the idea that my particular background makes me better, or even more qualified, than others. I simply listed my past experience and how it relates to the job I was interviewing for.

After I finished talking, the members of the committee relaxed back into their chairs. The guy who had asked the question paused and said, “well, that sounds substantial.”

Ha! Yes, it does, doesn’t it, sir. I am quite substantial. That is a word that means, in this context, not employable. It is as if the committee had said to me: “Indeed, you have a lot of skills and experience that no one will ever pay you for!”

The rest of the interview was polite enough, but I could tell it had ended the moment they relaxed back into their chairs and told me that my experience was “substantial.”

College administrations do not want candidates with ‘substantial’ experience doing the very things they are hiring someone to do. ‘Substantial’ is weighty in the bad sense. Committees, such as this one, know that, by hiring a ‘substantial’ candidate, they will get someone who already has a particular point of view developed over time while doing work directly relevant to the job. This is not necessarily a good thing.

In my case, my perspective has been informed by a decade of work, research, and writing. Employers do not want that. Instead, they want someone who can do the job, but who doesn’t have any opinions about the job yet. Such opinions they would rather provide along the way themselves. People with already-formed opinions born out of experience and through immersion in the relevant literature don’t always make the best cogs in a giant university bureaucracy.  At least, it seems that way.

I’m just a bit confused about the decision to temp at actual corporations instead [of teaching as an adjunct] which seems like even more demeaning work in a far less stimulating environment. Before (and sometimes while) I went to graduate school I too worked as a temp and a legal secretary at a law firm and then as a program manager at a couple of non-profit organizations in NYC and to tell you the truth all of those office jobs were, for the most part, boring and exhausting — and the non-profits were equally hierarchical and patriarchal. While adjuncting might not be ideal it seems like the lesser of two evils?

Many of us working outside the academic bubble would acknowledge that the non-academic world is not less hierarchical or less demanding than the academic world. My recent experiences have confirmed this. As a temp over the last few months, I have seen the inner workings of various organizations, including a law office, a non-profit, and a couple of corporations. All of the people (the underlings, at least) who work at these places seem miserable and bored (or they’re too young to know that they should be miserable and bored). Yet, the only thing that frightens these employees more than keeping their boring jobs is losing their boring jobs. Several people I have met, including full-timers and long-term temps, are absolutely terrified of getting fired or, in the case of the temps, watching the short-term jobs dry up like leaves on the vine.

One woman, a full-timer whom I sat next to for days at the Skyscraper Office, rarely uttered a word to me. (I’m just a temp, why bother?) The one conversation we did have involved me explaining to her the stress of temping and feeling like there might not be any work next week. She said wryly, “You think those of us with full-time jobs don’t feel that way too?” Then she advised me to go back to teaching because “people here will stab you in the back.” Yeah, because that could never happen in academia. What I have learned is that work sucks for most people. Perhaps I sound like a twerp. But, as a person who has had some kind of job since I was 14 years old, I stand by that statement. Why is working for wages such a soul-sucking enterprise? Let me get out my Marx and write another post about that later. For now, I will say that:

Caitlin is also right.

[D]espite the intrinsic interest of [teaching] . . . the material taught, and the stated mission of educating a citizenry and pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, universities are institutions that are often every bit as large, profit-seeking, hierarchical, demeaning and exploitative of their employees as for-profit corporations.

Indeed. It’s not only that people (including my sullen Skyscraper Office mate) don’t understand this fact; it’s that the notion of intrinsic value has been used to keep teachers from leaving bad jobs and from demanding better pay and work conditions. Many of us enrolled in grad programs because we thought working in a college and wearing tweed would automatically insulate us from the mean old corporate world that we despised. Well, the joke’s on us. This is not an accident. It is by design. If you haven’t read Debra Leigh Scott’s magnificent opus, “How the University Was Killed, In Five Easy Steps,” you should drop everything and read it. Scott describes how universities are now run like corporations, which is why they exploit 70% of their teachers, pay top administrators like Kings, and then plead poverty as an excuse to raise tuition. Why do we keep putting up with it?

There are 1.5 million college teachers in the US and one million of them are part-timers or are otherwise working on contingent contracts. What happens if they all decide not to show up for work one day? The American university system would simply grind to a halt. It’s not like it hasn’t happened in other places. In Canada, students have been on strike for months to protest increasing tuition. Assuming an adjunct strike could continue here for as short as a week or as long as a semester, the fallout would be enormous. There are literally hundreds – maybe thousands – of academic departments across the country that would cease to exist on the day the adjuncts disappeared. The only strength we have is in our numbers.

Of course, as Caitlin’s comment suggests, there is almost zero chance of a direct action like that ever happening in the US because (for one thing) so many adjuncts think of their work as a calling, as something with intrinsic value. The corporate managers know this, and they have used it against us. There are several campaigns coming out of Occupy Wall Street that are focused on organizing mass strikes. I still have hope that it could happen, and I will be there when it does. It’s the only way to ever change anything.

As for me, I am not even sure that teaching has any “intrinsic value” for me anymore, which is why, when my old boss from The College Where I Used to Adjunct, invited me to come back and teach two courses this fall, I was certain to decline.

But then I didn’t. I slept on it (it was actually less like sleeping and more like laying awake all night in a panic).

My old boss had emailed me at just the right (from her point of view) moment. I was in between two rotten temp jobs. I had recently applied for two full-time jobs for which I thought I was highly qualified. I had received no response, not even a “thanks for your application.” Furthermore, as anyone who reads this blog knows, many post-acs (including me) have a fraught relationship with our previous “work” and our former “fields.” We prepared for years to enter labor markets that do not exist. And being bounced around on the economic tides of history is a hard thing to reconcile. I feel like I am supposed to be a professional. Graduate school taught me to expect that. Teaching allows many of us to continue in the illusion that that is what we are, even though we are not and may never be again.

The other day, I was at a social gathering where new people were introducing themselves. One woman said, “I’m Terry, and I’m an English Professor.” See how she did that? She labeled herself as a professor in the same sentence in which she told us her name. Academic identities are hard habits to break, even when you know you should just walk away. It’s especially difficult when walking away means, on some level, embracing the new role-du-jour that the temp agency has assigned to you.

Finally, teaching is a job. I have made that argument on this blog before, and it occurred to me again during my night of not sleeping. When the temp agency calls to offer me a job as an admin assistant or as someone who types words into Google all day, I feel that I must say yes, almost every time: “Yes, temp agency, please sign me up for that boring job that I will hate. Thank you very much.” (True story: the owner of the temp agency called the other day to talk to me about a job. At the end of the call, she thanked for all my “good work.” I replied, “it’s my pleasure!” No, seriously, I really said that. Then I hung up the phone and got drunk.)

The point is, when someone calls offering to pay me a low wage and no benefits to sit in an office and file papers for hours, I (often) agree to do it. Why should adjuncting be any different? The idea that I couldn’t take a full-time job if I found one while teaching is not exactly right. I could – and would – walk out the door in the middle of the semester if a better opportunity came up. Why should I have any semester-long loyalty to the college that abuses me?

So, in case you haven’t guessed, I agreed to teach two classes at my former college. For money and for the freedom it allows me to, more or less, set my own schedule to complete some other projects I have on the horizon. I am not proud of this decision and have regretted it in the days since, especially now that I am writing syllabi for the first time in almost two years. (Read: I am doing a lot of work before I’ve even received a paycheck because of the “intrinsic value” of shaping young minds.)

But I only signed on for this one upcoming semester. I plan to still temp on the days when I am not teaching and during school holidays. And I will keep my eyes open for more regular employment. I plan, in other words, to do everything. At least until December. I figure that the life of an itinerant worker means I can’t really plan for the future. I can’t see around the corner. I can only see what comes next.

This is the place where every person who steps off the elevator and sees the view for the first time has a mental breakdown. It’s funny because most people cannot enjoy the view in mute stupefaction, as you might expect. They start oohhhing and ahhhing and taking photos with their stupid Smartphone like tourists and say, “isn’t that magnificent!?” It’s not a rhetorical question. They require confirmation. That is why, for those of us sitting in the reception area, a primary function of the job is pretending like we still give a shit about the view.

Here are some things that happened on the same day (or maybe on consecutive days, who can tell?) which will provide some information about my mental state as well as help explain why, in my next post, I need to address, rather urgently, the question: why did I quit teaching again?

First

The other day it was discovered by the Chef (yes, they have a Chef at the Skyscraper Office) that one of the VIPs would be eating two meals on site. (This usually doesn’t happen.) That day, the only protein the Chef had on hand was chicken. So – the horror! – the VIP would be served chicken twice in one day.

This was a terrible problem for the Chef and his staff. Urgent calls were made. Curses were uttered. There was simply nothing to be done: Mr. VIP would have to eat chicken twice in a single 24-hour period. Would heads roll? Would the Chef be fired? Would the world, in fact, end? We all hoped for the best outcome.

The day’s strangeness did not end there.

Second

That afternoon, word went around the office that there had been a suicide at a building around the corner. Some poor soul had jumped from a $1,000/night hotel balcony (21 stories up) and landed on a parked SUV. It was awful.

The same guy who had to eat chicken twice that day (and whose opinion of the Chef’s blunder was still unknown) had never spoken a word to me before. Yet, on his way out the door, he said to me grimly, “Don’t walk by the [blah blah] Hotel on your way home.”

There you have it: The VIP of Chicken does not want the receptionist/temp to accidentally see the suicide thing happening around the corner on her way home. Isn’t that nice/weird?

What do these events have to do with each other, you ask? I have no idea, but surely it’s something. That, or I’ve become one of those crazed paranoids who thinks everything is connected, because of the CIA or the space aliens.

Third

Further evidence of my growing insanity: There is another temp who sits next to me at Skyscraper. (They are having a hard time keeping full-time receptionists from quitting in disgust, it seems.) At one point, she and I became so loopy from the boredom of the job coupled with the terror of doing anything wrong (or maybe it was just the altitude) that we fell into a fit of uncontrollable laughter at the sight of an incorrectly placed question mark on an email we were about to send. It totally changed the meaning of the sentence, as question marks tend to do! And that was just so hysterical!

It’s a good thing no one walked into the office at that moment, because we could not have stopped almost peeing our pants for anyone, even the CEO.

Fourth

That night, I arrived home and discovered that another smart, thoughtful person had commented on this post. Djuna has basically called me out, and for that I am grateful:

“I’m just a bit confused about the decision to temp at actual corporations instead [of teaching] which seems like even more demeaning work in a far less stimulating environment. I understand that you’re looking for a more promising permanent job while temping but why not do that while teaching?”

Ha ha, yeah, so there’s that. What am I doing anyway? I will attempt to write a response in my next post and, perhaps, by doing so, I can figure it out and reclaim a bit of mental clarity in the process.

Actually, maybe I couldn’t have figured it out that easily because, what counts as “teaching” anyway? Is emailing students part of the work of illuminating young minds? What about when you’re standing in a museum looking at a pretty painting and  – ding ding ding! – you get an idea for something to do in class? Is that a teaching duty that should be added into the hourly calculation? Probably. But no one actually does the math on stuff like that.

The point is that when I was just getting some money for things that I did, even though I never had a lot and was always running out at the end of the pay cycle, I never thought about what I was earning per hour. I did some stuff and I got money for it, that it.

How things change! I have a whole new perspective now that my worth as a working person/human being has been precisely calculated on an hourly scale by a barely-visible, all-powerful organization called “the temp agency.

My psychology has responded accordingly. I have gotten into the habit of calculating just how much of my time on Earth all my expenses are actually costing me at the average rate of $15/hour.  Here are some recent examples.

Ice Coffee. This is an expense that is hard to escape in NYC because these frosty drinks are as ubiquitous as fedoras in hipster Brooklyn, and it is so god damn hot in the summer. When you see someone walking down the street with a milky ice coffee on a humid day, you have to get one too. Cost: $2.50 – Amount of time I have to work to pay for it: 10 minutes.

Lunchtime Sandwich. Here things start to get tricky because I have been eating my lunchtime sandwich from the corner deli during my unpaid lunch break from the temp job. That means that not only am I not earning my hourly during that time, I am spending money on food-fuel so that I may return to the site of labor and work some more. This presents a unique problem for the Math-challenged English major. Does the sandwich (which costs around $8 in Manhattan) actually cost more than $8 because I am not getting paid to eat it? In other words, what is an equation that would allow me to calculate the exact cost of the sandwich in actual labor time considering that I paid to eat it while not getting paid (to eat it)?

I confess it is a conundrum for the newly initiated.

Shoes For Work. I have reluctantly purchased a few items of clothing to wear to various office gigs. (Though one is expected to work for a low wage, one is not expected to dress like it.) Last month, I had to buy a $30 pair of shoes (at a discount store, obviously). I had to work 2 hours to pay for those shoes.

Yet, in a way, the shoes and the sandwich present a similar problem.

I had to work to pay for the shoes according to a scale of labor time measured in dollars. Yet, if I didn’t buy the shoes, I wouldn’t be presentable for work. So because I had to buy the shoes in order to work and then I had to work for 2 hours to pay for the shoes, are the shoes worth more or less than what I paid for them? I think what I’m asking is, What are shoes needed to work to pay for the shoes actually worth?

Do you see how the difficulties pile up? I have realized that it is not just a matter of how much I earn versus how much I spend. There is some cosmic shit going on! To wit:

Faxing My Timesheet. Every week I have to fax my timesheet to the temp agency so I can get the money they owe me (which is a percentage of the much larger amount that the employer paid them). If I work on the day the timesheet is due, I cannot get home in time to fax it, so I have to fax it from a business that charges me $1.50 for the service. That means I have to work 6 minutes to pay for the fax that I must send to prove that I worked. If I don’t send the fax, I will not get paid. But if I don’t work, then I don’t need to send the fax, so in that case it doesn’t cost me 6 minutes of labor time.

((Head Spinning))

Finally, these hourly calculations are altering my behavior in ways that I previously thought impossible.

Alcohol. I enjoy a nice cold glass of vodka or two at the end of the work day. Sometimes it has some juice in it or a little lemon peel is quite nice, but I am not particular.

The other day I was standing in the liquor store preparing to make my vodka selection, something I have done a million times before, on autopilot. This time, in response to my new found penchant for performing complex mathematical calculations in my head, I examined the prices more closely. The bottle I usually get is $35. That means I would have to temp more than 2 hours to pay for it.

I paused and considered the options.

I changed brands. I purchased a $30 bottle, saving myself something like 12 minutes of labor time (you fancy math people will have to correct me on the numbers which I know are wrong).

But the thing is, if I wasn’t working a miserable temp job, I wouldn’t drink as much vodka, probably. So then I could get the good stuff and just drink less of it. But I couldn’t afford the good stuff if I wasn’t working, even though the fact that I am working has increased my consciousness of wage slavery, which has prompted me to both drink more and to purchase the less expensive bottle.

Of course, I could forgo the juice or lemon peel to save money, but – come on now – I am not a savage.

So, as you can see, my attempt to figure out how much things actually cost and how much my life is worth (which, it turns out, is the same as figuring out how many ice coffees I can afford in a month) is very difficult indeed for the hourly temp.

Instead of thinking about it, I will make my vodka drink and watch some Dressage.

*Of course, I worked for an hourly wage for years before entering the grad school precarious employment mill, but it’s easy to forget, especially when you think you’ve left those days behind now that you’ve been accepted into the Grad School University. After all, one has no problem accepting low wages for an apprenticeship on the road to academic bliss.