It’s Official

After several false starts over the past week leading towards a formal offer and a promise that I would get a call on Friday. Sure enough, I got a call at 4:45 pm on Friday formally offering me the job at a salary 20% higher than the other desirable job offer that ended up not working out.

Calendar

What I don’t know yet is when I’ll start.  Still some paperwork to do and, evidently, some corporate processing of everything, but I think the date will be between 9/14 and 9/28.  So here I go back into the full-time work world. Gulp.

At the end of the week I’m heading up to the mountains for a week. Then I’ll return and move into my new job. Of course, since I’m not tied to an office I could even work from the mountains if I choose.  Looking forward to the mountains in late summer.

Ski Run in Summer

Every morning when I’m up there I take a walk to the top of the mountain. I walk past all the ski runs, now overgrown with wild grass.  It is a lovely and calming sight, I must say. I feel restored every time I take this walk.

During my walk I pass an overlook. When the view is not obscured by fog or by haze I walk over and take a look at the bowl created by the intersection of the east/west and north/south ridges. At the intersection of the ridge is where the ski runs begin and descend into the bowl. The bowl opens to the north and northwest. Here you can see the ski run I walk past later in my walk. The top of the run is 5,500 feet elevation.

New Camera

I bought a new camera and tried it out at the zoo last week. It is a mega-zoom digital but not DSLR.  But better than my old camera. Here is a photo of a new baby giraffe and its mother.

Well, the camera put the grass behind the giraffes in focus rather than the giraffes. I need to work on technique.

Here is a picture of our large tuxedo, Milo. What is he trying to say?

So goodbye retirement, for the time being. While we are not “born for battle only”, I return to a hopefully gentler fray then the one I left in 2006.

Retirement

by Henry Timrod

]]> http://richardisretired.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/formal-job-offer/feed/ 0 richardisretired What Day? Mountain Scene View across the bowl to top of Ski Lift Mother giraffe nuzzling her baby. Cat looking into cameral lens http://richardisretired.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/back-again/ http://richardisretired.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/back-again/#comments Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:01:54 +0000 richardisretired http://richardisretired.wordpress.com/?p=251 ]]>

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING?

I’ve been gone for quite a while but now am back, I think.  My blog name is not so accurate anymore. I’ve been working at the local community college for several years part-time.

FSCJ Logo

I’ve enjoyed the mission of the college: serve a traditionally under-served urban population that is primarily African-American and immigrants.  I’ve helped hundreds of immigrants with choosing English language classes that meet their skill level, talked to them about their trip to America, suggested paths to the education they need to succeed in the United States. I’ve tested hundreds upon hundreds of students trying to get into academic programs to get their GEDs, high school diplomas, vocational certificates, college degrees.

I’ve been happy to do that at FSCJ.  My fellow workmates often are a challenge, as they are anywhere. I will miss some but many others I will soon happily forget. The scope of the job is fairly small — administer tests, advise students of test results and where to go for additional information and training, administer GED, CLEP, ACT/SAT exams, and Florida Teacher Certification Exams. Perfect for a retired, part-time worker looking to stay connected to the outside world and make a little money to do things like put a roof on our house, remodel bathrooms and kitchens, put Hardieplank siding up.

You can see how nice it looks now. Doesn’t even look like siding.

I’ve tried to spend more time in the North Carolina mountains.  Lovely during the summer — highs in the 60’s and 70’s, lows in the 50’s and 60’s.  But the winter and spring is something else: high winds, fog, cold temps. Just generally unhospitable.

Here’s an example:

The wind was out of the north at 30 mph and the temperature was around 40. Just your average spring day at 5,000 feet elevation!!

NOW SOMETHING NEW

During my time at FSCJ I’ve cast around for other things to do as well. Once I started working again after being retired for 9 months I realized I wouldn’t mind working full-time again. I put in a number of applications.

Richard Deftly Applying For Jobs.

Mostly they were ignored, thrown in the trash, left in computer queues, crumpled up, X’ed out, tossed in fireplace, recycled, used underneath bird cages, pointed at as objects of derision.

Occasionally I would get an interview which were polite and satisfyingly engaging but rarely turned into anything beyond a discussion between strangers.  But several went better than that.

I was offered a curriculum job at the FAA Training Academy in Oklahoma City which didn’t work out at all. While I like Oklahoma City just fine, having spent a lot of time in software classes there, I didn’t want to make it my permanent home. I was also offered a database manager job with a school system nearby but the IT manager was a little too much like my old FAA manager. I said “No thanks”.

But recently, as the economy took a nosedive, I’ve had two job offers.

I'm the smiling one in the middle.

The first one was with a big UK defense firm that has expanded to include government operations on both sides of the Atlantic. I was to work as a systems analyst in Washington DC. My wife and I discussed it and thought we could work it out especially since the job paid a salary well into the 6-figures. However, as it turned out, personal circumstances intervened and I was unable to take the job even though I had already gone to Arlington, VA to find a place to live. But some things are not meant to happen.

Fortune’s Wheel

My wife explained it to me. You see, Rota Fortunae sometimes intervenes in the affairs of men and women, a point made vividly to Peter I of Cyprus in as described by Chaucer in  The Canterbury Tales:

O noble Peter, Cyprus’ lord and king,

Which Alexander won by mastery,

To many a heathen ruin did’st thou bring;

For this thy lords had so much jealousy,

That, for no crime save thy high chivalry,

All in thy bed they slew thee on a morrow.

And thus does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously

And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.

And this from Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium Paris: 1467

The illustration shows Boccaccio pointing to the goddess Fortune who stands beside a wheel upon which her victims rise and fall.

I’m happy to say that the wheel did not out of happiness bring me to sorrow.

And this victim, such as I may be, did not rise and fall but rather continued to rise, if I may say so without seeming impossibly egotistical.

Cooler Job

Now I’ve been offered an even cooler job. The scope is much broader and I get to telecommute from Jacksonville. I have the informal job offer but will give more details when the formal job offer comes this week.

What Work Is

BY PHILIP LEVINE

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

You rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it’s someone else’s brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, “No,

we’re not hiring today,” for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who’s not beside you or behind or

ahead because he’s home trying to

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don’t know what work is.

“What Work Is” from What Work Is.  1992

Lots of Rain

Lots of Rain

If I look at rainfall totals in June through today we’ve had about 13.3 inches. The drought definitely is over for the time being. A couple of months ago all we talked about were the proliferation of Florida fires.  Hard to imagine more than 33,000 acres burned in May. CNN has some nice video on the fires. 

Fire as Narcissism

Carl Hiaasen often talks about Florida as a haven for every sort of wacko. He was interviewed by a former Florida journalist on 60 Minutes two years ago:

the craziness of Florida provides a certain anonymity to all sorts of wackos, even terrorists. And if the place wasn’t so dysfunctional, Hiaasen says maybe something could have been done about that. 

He offers a number of examples

“The court had ruled it ‘Gators In Bed is Bad Idea,’” says Hiaasen, referring to one clipping. “This was a story about a guy who was sleeping with two full-grown alligators. And a court ruled that he had no constitutional right to sleep with an endangered reptile. And that happened in Florida.” 

And

“Here’s a guy who was stealing medical equipment, He surrenders. It’s — he was unhooking patients from their heart monitors and stealing the heart monitors. This was in West Palm Beach,” says Hiaasen, referring to another clipping. “That’s quite a crime when you think about it. The guys on a heart monitor. ‘Excuse me while I take the machine.’” 

Florida invites wackos into their midst:

The tourists eventually go home. But for Hiaasen, the larger problem is the thousand people who move here every day. Most of them, he says, are either running to something or from something. Many of them are retirees looking for a slice of paradise, and some are predators who consider them prey. 

“Half the guys who get booted off of Wall Street by the SCC are now working in Boca Raton, Florida,” says Hiaasen. 

Another reason Florida has become so desirable for undesirables is it has the most generous bankruptcy laws in the country — so people facing the prospect of jail or civil judgments buy houses here knowing they can’t be seized. A number of former executives from Tyco and WorldCom have already moved here, along with a few down and out celebrities. 

Even OJ is here

“You know, after the second O.J. Simpson trial, I see his lawyer being interviewed on the steps of court house,” says Hiaasen. “You know, ‘Mr. Simpson may have to leave California. He doesn’t have this kind of money, and he may have to leave California.’ And I turned to my wife and I said, ‘He’s coming to Florida.’ And here he is, you know.” 

And this has WHAT to do with fires and narcissism?

Bob Jones toddled down to Lakeland recently where he described to Florida revivalists 

 how profound it was that the Florida Healing Revival and fire of God was soaring throughout Florida to the world, and in conjunction with that, the forest fires in Florida are also tearing across the land.

Certainly, the forest fires are a trajedy, but we noted how much of a confirmation it was that both spiritual and natural fires were ablaze.

Fires = the success of Jones’ revival and the strength of his followers’ faith. Can I be misinterpreting this?  Well, Jones also suggests

in one of his prophetic encounters…Bob was told that the enemy is vigorously working to steal the “dreams” of God’s people. Primarily, the dreams consist of hopes and aspirations birthed in the spirit of Christians that motivate them in prayer and set them on their prophetic journey. 

The enemy is trying to steal dreams which are manifested in the spirit. Spiritual fires are confirmed by the tragic Florida fires this spring, thus fighting fires facilitates the victory of  God’s enemies.

I’m sure if this was explicated to Jones he would say that is ridiculous. But in his own focus on his personal expression of belief he allows the tragedies of others serve as a marketing hook for his own business.  I think this can be defined as narcissistic (excessive self-admiration and self-centeredness). 

We do attract wackos. Of course I am not talking about myself here.

God Loves You, And So Do I

Because it is what he says always, to anyone
(the dull girl in the tollbooth at the Triboro Bridge,
the wrong number who calls every night at nine,
the lamed colostomist who checks his colon,
even the stone-faced trooper who stops him
for driving 30 on the New York Thruway), my father,
the old Hassid from Frankfurt, passes through this life
in the vague service of some deific love,
and now I-having passed through hate
and back into love again-find myself saying it too
as we scud down the turnpike from Bar Harbor to Boston,
and a vague, generalized tenderness comes over me
in which I am the large man who carries his father
like unleavened bread, the one appointed
to shake the seeds of his ancestry into the day,
and, as we cruise down the highway
of tollbooths and diners, I become once more
the wild ideologue of my father’s life-a man
waiving a white handkerchief into the air as he
plays the harmonica, calling out
to anyone who will listen:
“God loves you, and so do I.”

            ———————–from The Wages of Goodness by Michael Blumenthal

The Drive Up and Back

The drive up to the mountains and back was not as bad as it has been in the past. With gas prices so high some drivers appear to be slowing down. And in the summer heat we saw dozens of cars with their windows open to reduce gas consumption. I calculated we spent about $225 just getting there and back.

Just Because They Love The Mountains Does Not Mean They Are Green

But I’ve noticed that people with mountain vacation homes are not the greenest of people. While I am at the very low end of the spectrum, mountain vacation home people are incredible drains on resources. In the case of our mountain, we have chosen to live at 5,000 feet elevation. Everything has to be transported up here from the flatlands. Not a small majority drive big SUVs that only get 14 mpg on straight and level roads. On winding, mountainous roads they might be getting 10.  Up and down the mountains, doing errands, picking up new bedsheets and a nice bottle of Cabernet Savignon.

No Gas Saved Here.

Well, OK, this picture is in Colorado, but you get the idea. Add to that the idea of surplus….

Economic Surplus

Where We All Want To Be.

All of these people are in that are of consumer surplus. The line rising left to right represent prices and the line dropping from left to right is income. When you have more income than needed to pay for goods, that area labelled consumer surplus, you on top of the world and looking for a place to display your economic prowess. Some invest in houses in the mountains. What could have less utility than a place you stay on only occasionally and requires enormous resources to supply?

It’s ugly but that is where we are.

Nevertheless, it’s wonderful there and I wouldn’t give it up for some egalitarian principle.

Why I Suffer The Disease of Economic Surplus…

Here’s a vista from an outcropping I pass each day I walk to the top of the mountain:

Looking into the bowl between ridges.

Not to mention the views from our deck:

Looking East From Our Deck

Matchless view just a few steps from our living room.

Not to mention what I get to see when I get to the top of the mountain.

What I see at the Top.

This ski run goes down the back side of the mountain. Even in summer it’s chilly up here — The day I took this photo the temp was 44 degrees.

At the psychological bottom of economic surplus is the will to avoid just what Philip Booth does in his poem just below — to compulsively count out the small measure given to us in a lifetime. To blot out worry, anticipation, the bad we intentionally or unintentionally leave in our wake. To swerve around the pinched equlibrium of this poem: if I’m not sorry I worry,/if I can’t worry I count.

Adding It Up

My mind’s eye opens before
the light gets up. I
lie awake in the small dark,
figuring payments, or how
to scrape paint; I count
rich women I didn’t marry.
I measure bicycle miles
I pedaled last Thursday
to take off weight; I give some
passing thought to the point
that if I hadn’t turned poet
I might well be some other
sort of accountant. Before
the sun reports its own weather
my mind is openly at it:
I chart my annual rainfall,
or how I’ll plant seed if
I live to be fifty. I look up
words like “bilateral symmetry”
in my mind’s dictionary; I consider
the bivalve mollusc, re-pick
last summer’s mussels on Condon Point,
preview the next red tide, and
hold my breath: I listen hard
to how my heart valves are doing.
I try not to get going
too early: bladder permitting,
I mean to stay in bed until six;
I think in spirals, building
horizon pyramids, yielding to
no man’s flag but my own.
I think a lot of Saul Steinberg:
I play touch football on one leg,
I seesaw on the old cliff, trying
to balance things out: job,
wife, children, myself.
My mind’s eye opens before
my body is ready for its
first duty: cleaning up after
an old-maid Basset in heat.
That, too, I inventory:
the Puritan strain will out,
even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,
I’m Puritan to the bone, down to
the marrow and then some:
if I’m not sorry I worry,
if I can’t worry I count.

———Philip Booth, “Adding It Up” from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999

July Fourth in the Mountains

We’ve been up in the mountains for two weeks now.  Wonderful.  July 4th is a great time to be here. We can stand on our deck and see fireworks going off in Elizabethton, Johnson City, Vilas, Mountain City, Jefferson.

Elizabethton Celebration

These are all relatively small productions, nothing like New York or Washington or even Tampa. Parade organizers tend to wear American flag polo shirts and look like the proprietor of the local dry goods store.

Waiting for the Fun to begin.

Or the fun is stored in trailers supervised by a couple of guys waiting to set up whatever game this is. Not the balls are red, white & blue.

Waiting for the parade.

Or a crowd in Johnson City on the parade route.

The Fireworks

But ends in spectacular fireworks.

The fireworks is what we saw from such a great distance and elevation. We watched a half dozen fireworks displays going off at once.  We’d see the fireworks and then with whatever length of time it takes for the sound to travel all those miles, we’d get the explosion.

Our Time Here

We’ve had a great time. The weather has rarely been above 74 and has been as low as 44 degrees one morning over these past several weeks. Each morning I’d walk up to the top of the mountain. It’s about two miles up and two miles back with an elevation change of 700 feet. Each morning I’d see deer, wild turkeys, skunks, ground hogs, rabbits. Not many people live that high so the road I walked was primarily empty. So I had the walk up there and back pretty much to myself.

I walked along this road each morning. Quiet, just the sound of the wind and birds. Several times deer trotted past me almost soundlessly. I didn’t know they were there until I saw them. This is an experience absolutely unduplicatable in Florida.

Which is why we have a place up here.

Usually we would get up around 5:45. Marian wants to get down to the track she runs before it gets crowded so I get up and start my way up the mountain.

One morning I took this picture on the deck. Our deck faces due north but turning to the right gives me this view. In this case fog still was in the valleys between the mountains and the sun was just beginning to rise above the mountain tops. Just beautiful. A scene pretty much unchanged over the last century.

The trees are all second-growth, naturally. Lumber companies had the first shot at these trees. What we see now has grown since the timber industry moved west.

During the non-ski months the ski runs are untended. Wild grass grows to inhibit erosion and this fence bounds the ski slope.  Just a beautiful scene to walk through each day.

Our neighbor put a barrel with deer corn out below our deck and, sure, enough, at sunset we began to see deer. Late at night we can hear other creatures eating there but it is too dark to see who they are.

Difficult

We are up in the North Carolina mountains now where the temps are cool (around 72 or so) and the views all are of the million-dollar kind. But we have resisted installing broadband at our place here because (1) it wasn’t available until recently, and (2) we didn’t want to pay for it when we weren’t here.

But now the broadband provider has seasonal programs for those of us not bearing the -5 degree daily highs in winter and we are installing it tomorrow. Meanwhile I sit in the local Internet cafe typing this out. But tomorrow I can do it from the comfort of my own living room.  Makes the place complete.

Update

The cable guy came today and managed to leave us with less than what we had at the beginning of the day. No cable and no internet. After an hour or so on the phone we have the basic cable we began the day with but we do have Internet (yeah)!

We have managed to leave Florida just as they are suffering through afternoon deluges. Back when I was in undergraduate school in Tampa (this was some time ago) afternoon tropical downpours were everyday events. But as the climate slowly changes these afternoon thunderstorms have disappeared.  But now they are back, I’m happy to say. I’m sure it has something to do with our weather oscillations but I haven’t researched it at all yet.

The Rain

BY ROBERT CREELEY

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent-
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Off

My first vacation since beginning my new job. Of course, I was off for 10 months before starting this job so I can’t say I haven’t had a few days off over the last year.

212 Degrees 

The president of the college where I work has launched an email campaign titled 212 Degrees. Nothing to introduce this campaign, no statement of purpose, no meeting in the auditorium to get it started. Rather, one day we have no emails titled 212 Degrees and the next day we did.  And on and on since then.

So, what is this thing?

Looking through Internet resources I find it to be one of these management motivation schemes created by a couple of entrepreneurs and sold to a bunch of corporate management types as a, you know, pre-packaged  program guaranteed to empower employees without having to really do anything. Here is an example of their copy:

One extra degree can make all the difference

At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils.
And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.

One extra degree = Exponential results

Join hundreds of thousands of people around the world now being inspired by 212 to give more 
and, ultimately, enjoy more.

Well, this doesn’t seem so bad. All good things: try harder and get better results.

What Else?

There’s stuff to buy, naturally. Books and decals for a certain price

Books for $12.95, the video for $200, pullovers for $39, gear bags for $23.  Takes gear to get to 212 degrees. If you are not sure of where to go with this you can call Tina at this merchandising site    for “tips on creating a 212 culture.”

Gosh, is that all it takes — a couple of tips from a salesperson?  

The Upshot

Evidently our campus president attended one of these merchandising events and decided to change our culture by sending out emails.  They consist of a couple of personal words and then a quote or two. Anchoring the emails is this:

“We can do no great things — only small things with great love.”

Mother Theresa

So what is wrong with this? First of all, this isn’t how Mother Teresa spells her name. OK. anything else?  Searching legitimate Teresa sites the quote attributed to Mother Teresa can’t be found. I found that many of the quotes the president uses in her 212 degree emails can’t be found in the books of those quoted.

Conclusion

Succumbing to the promise of effortless culture climate change, our president thinks casual and careless emails can do what legions of experts usually cannot pull off — effectively changing the culture of an organization. Even worse, her message transmits precisely the opposite message she intended. She spends a couple of minutes trolling the internet for quotes that seem apt but actually are bogus. She passes them off as quotes from writers she knows. But she knows them not at all since she misattributes quotes from them. 

So she touts going the extra mile to make a difference (only one extra degree to get the water boiling) but takes the easiest path possible to distribute this message.

While I am only tangentially associated with this institution I find this effort wan  and terribly dishonest.  Didn’t expect that in an academic institution.

Proverbs 14:8

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, 
       but the folly of fools is deception.

No Rain

Rain all around the area but not here. Looking at the last 12 months of temps and I find 7 months above normal. Almost one degree above normal. Great that we get warmer and warmer.

What I’m Reading

 I’ve been reading Rick Atkinson’s series on WWII. The first is An Army at Dawn, describing in great detail (704 pages) the invasion of North Africa. Read this book and you will gain a real understanding of the complexity, chaos, and tragedy of war. We think of WWII as a noble effort supported by a uniformly positively public. A flawless and well-executed war.

Can’t be farther from the truth. Atkinson describes campaigns designed by planners unfamiliar with the units they were deploying using faulty intelligence. Over time the planners and soldiers learned from their mistakes but before they learned tens of thousands of troops died.  Atkinson’s analysis is clear-cut and fast-moving.

 The second book in the series is The Day of Battle, describing the invasion of Italy.  Once again, in fascinating detail (816 pages) Atkinson faithfully follows the Allies across the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Sicily and onto the continent. He is especially good at assessing the decisions made by generals and describing how their personalities affected their confidence or skepticism about battle campaigns. 

The Italian campaign’s outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by General Mark Clark, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. Atkinson tells us how they began the war untested and uncertain but emerged by the Spring of 1944 as battle-hardened and effective commanders.

Atkinson skewers the idealistic view of war that Nemerov mocks in the poem below.

The War In The Air by Howard Nemerov

For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.

Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,

Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.

That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness’s sake.
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.

                 ——–from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov.

Weekends, Concept Of

I have to say that while I was just plain retired I began to lose the concept of weekends. Of course, some cultures never really had it. I recently saw this on the Online Bangalore website:

Although not new, the concept of weekend as perceived and practised in Western countries started acquiring popularity and practical force only recently in Bangalore. Weekend here means the whole of Saturday and Sunday for some or half of Saturday and Sunday for some others, but it does clearly mean Sunday for almost everyone. 

I was losing even the concept of Sunday. But now that I have returned to a more regular schedule I once again feel the limits of weekends. I have mixed feelings, I guess, about that. But I like at least the rhythm of work and like that I do it less than full-time.

More later.

Gone But Have Returned

Well, I’ve been away for some time but now I’m back. I’ve been working 32 hours each week at my part-time job but it is feeling a little full-timeish recently. For instance, yesterday I worked 13 hours to solve a scheduling problem.  I was scheduled to supervise GED testing in the morning but had inadvertently also been scheduled to work with new immigrants (from Burma, Colombia, Vietnam, Haiti, Ukraine, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Syria, and other places) in the evening. No one else qualified to work with the new immigrants was available so I volunteered to work late. This is part-time????

A Job Commonplace

 My original intent in this little job was to offer a service to underserved populations, get back into the work-world a bit, and encounter a slice of life otherwise invisible to those of us living in middle-class suburbs.

Certainly I’ve seen quite a slice of life not experienced before. Every day I talk to immigrants and Americans at the bottom end of the education ladder. In the past I’ve worked and studied with educational elites. If they are the sun of the academic world then I’m now working in the shadows — with dropouts, screw-ups, the vastly underemployed, and, of course, immigrants just taking their first steps in a new world of unfamiliar customs, a strange language, and without the support of nearby family.

 They come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are attractive and young like this mother and daughter used by Catholic Charities to raise money. But more often they are people who have lived hard lives full of physical labor yielding little in the way of wealth. 

But they want to adopt American values and culture, they want to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of America, they want to be part of America and everything positive it stands for.  

I don’t recognize in these people the political attacks made by politicians and cable news talking heads. They want to work hard for success, they want to speak English so they can join the American economic mainstream, they want their children to grow up as Americans. Their attitudes are a tonic to feeling bad about American prospects.

The Impact of Underemployment

If only that was all there was to this job.  As a part-time job with no benefits it does not attract workers in the middle of building a life-long career. Rather, it attracts intelligent people who are in between jobs or have reached a dead end of some kind in their work or people like me — occasional workers with no career aspirations. Underemployment – the employment of workers with high skill levels in low-wage jobs that do not require such abilities –  tends to lead to workers feeling undervalued and often bored.  A bad combination. In the case of the college where I work now these feelings led one worker to needle another worker to the point she complained about a hostile work environment.  The man doing the needling thought I had some part in her complaint (I didn’t, actually) and now he glares hostilely at me most days as well as not talking to me.

I can live with this I suppose but the atmosphere is ridiculously tense and leads me to wonder why we all just can’t get along, to reference another person at odds with his work environment.

Maybe I’ll just go back to being retired.

This poem by Bob Hicok has reflects what seems to be the attitude of several people I work with now.

After working sixty hours again for what reason

The best job I had was moving a stone
from one side of the road to the other.
This required a permit which required
a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.
Yet because I hadn’t finished the job
I had no salary, and to pay the bribe
I took a job moving the stone
the other way. Because the official
wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit
for the second job. When I pointed out
that the work would be best completed
if I did nothing, he complimented
my brain and wrote a letter
to my employer suggesting promotion
on stationery bearing the wings
of a raptor spread in flight
over a mountain smaller than the bird.
My boss, fearing my intelligence,
paid me to sleep on the sofa
and take lunch with the official
who required a bribe to keep anything
from being done. When I told my parents,
they wrote my brother to come home
from university to be slapped
on the back of the head. Dutifully,
he arrived and bowed to receive
his instruction, at which point
sense entered his body and he asked
what I could do by way of a job.
I pointed out there were stones
everywhere trying not to move,
all it took was a little gumption
to be the man who didn’t move them.
It was harder to explain the intricacies
of not obtaining a permit to not
do this. Just yesterday he got up
at dawn and shaved, as if the lack
of hair on his face has anything
to do with the appearance of food
on an empty table.

        ————— from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok