So Mexico has turned a Little Black Sambo derivative into a postage stamp. Ugh.
And in the same world, same hemisphere, same continent, Michael Gorman dissed hip-hop fans publicly and got away with it cold.
I do love librarianship and librarians. But, still, UGH.
Just to say that David finished the floor-repair job in the bathroom. He just couldn’t pass up a chance to use the particular little locution referenced in the title of this post.
The library world needs more Rochelles, I rather think. I think this because the ones we’ve got are such outstanding people. Must be some impressive kabbalah in the name.
(No, I won’t be changing my name, thanks all the same. I’m rather fond of mine, having found its distinctiveness a distinct asset.)
Anyway, Rochelle Mazar just hit the nail on the head about blogging and jobs:
My new struggle with this blog is to remain as honest as ever, as optimistic as ever, and to speak with a voice that stands a step away from my job. Not that my job won’t affect what I think or what I say, but I want my voice to remain purely mine, and with an audience that is not only external and not only internal. This may be more of a struggle about retaining a sense of independence than one of toeing the party line.
Read the whole thing, do; it’s a keeper.
When I interviewed at Ruritania, they were much exercised that I not take everyday workplace-internal wrangling public (or, at least, that’s what I heard from what they said to me). I tread that line, sometimes, though on the rare occasion I’ve something genuinely cutting to say, I make sure I’m saying it about somebody higher up the line, because I don’t believe in anything that could remotely look like bullying.
And for the most part, it’s easier, nicer, and just plain more fun to blog the good stuff. (I’m still touched by finding my name on the staff list. Wow, feeling included before I even get there!)
There’s a difference, too, between commenting negatively on a phenomenon that truly is exclusively workplace-internal (which is a bad idea, full stop), and commenting negatively on a widespread phenomenon that one’s workplace only happens to exhibit. I happen to think the latter is fair game, though it’s not cricket to hold up one’s employer to specific scorn. I’ve had employers disagree with me on that, though, even after they’ve said aloud that they wouldn’t tread on my independence. That disagreement, to me, is a key part of the struggle Rochelle is talking about.
I don’t like the yardstick “don’t write what you’re unwilling to lose your job over,” because that puts me at the mercy of my hierarchical superiors’ whims, and their whims haven’t always made sense in the past. Moreover, my superiors have a certain amount of responsibility to engage with my ideas and avoid messenger-slayage, too. That said, though, I did more or less lose my job over the abovementioned wrangle, because it spurred my decision to leave. Expressing things I care a lot about—whether they affect my specific workplace or no—is just that important to me, apparently. I don’t see that changing.
Thing is, though, I don’t like the idea that my coworkers would feel afraid of CavLec, either. They shouldn’t. It’s not here to torment them. It’s not a vehicle for passive aggression. (If I’ve got a problem, it’s my bloody responsibility to bring it up and get it solved; silent frustration helps nobody. If I learned nothing else in my topsy-turvy years, I learned that. I also learned that most people are pretty reasonable if approached reasonably—and the ones who aren’t, you run from very very fast.) For the most part, CavLec’s not even about the job, so why need they worry?
I’m with Rochelle on not wanting to titillate people looking for someone to “dish about the dark corners.” Bah. We do good work, we librarians, and I’ve never met a librarian blogger who didn’t respect that. We get sharp about some practices, even some people, but we damn well love our profession.
All this is tricky. I’ll lay substantial odds that Rochelle will find a good balance, though, and I hope I will too.
I have absolutely no idea whether we’re days ahead of the game, or cruising for an all-night panicked packing session July 11.
The basement is clear, except for a few laundry oddments. The guest room is clear except for a couple of fragile lamps that need careful packing and the night-table, which is about to get bunged unceremoniously on top of the upended guest-room bed (which will become our bed in our new digs, since we no longer have a guest-room). I’ve cleared out the shelves in our bedroom closet and all but emptied the office closet.
The living room is missing its couch, because my husband is an utter madman who insisted on moving it himself. I’m guessing we’re about half-done with the books. I filled a substantial box with kitchen stuff today (emptying a couple of drawers and cabinets), and anticipate filling another one tomorrow. The bathroom, our office, and our bedroom are pretty disastrous still, but we do have another clothes-chest ready to go into the pod.
The pod is slightly more than one-fifth full, gauging by floor space.
The Goths are starting to wig. Change is bad, don’t you know. We haven’t actually done anything much with Didi’s favorite haunts, but Dream has taken to sulking in a cardboard box on one wing of my office desk. (Said box with cat in it is now known as a “darkness box,” after the lovely LeGuin story.) Even worse, he got his tail stepped on by accident this afternoon, and only copious amounts of kitty-treats earned his forgiveness.
We’ve signed the real-estate agreement. The city is conspiring to make a mess of our house sale, tearing up the street for a solid mile around… but they’re supposed to be done a week or so after the house hits the MLS, so let us hope they don’t go too far over time.
We’re not going to make as much on this house as I’d hoped, but with that twinge of disappointment I shut my mouth firmly—because we will make a substantial sum of money.
And if you know anybody who might want a sweet, low-maintenance, energy-efficient, three-bedroom ranch on the near-west side of Madison, please let them know we’re selling! Heck, we’ll throw in a signed copy of Gateway to Sindarin at closing, if our buyer happens to like that kind of thing.
I had occasion to pop by the Library Systems Office’s website, and I see that I’m already listed on their staff, with a work phone number and everything. That’s so sweet I could just hug a server.
Have I said lately I’m psyched about my new job? I’m psyched about my new job!
That said, back to packing…
A central aim of not a few source-code audits is to end up with many fewer lines of code than one started with. Annihilate the cruft, yep yep.
The same is true of moving, if one substitutes “units of useless stuff” for “lines of code.”
I’ve about run through all the easily Freecyclable stuff, so the remaining cruft is heading in bits and pieces for St. Vinnie’s. Two garbage bags full of ex-clothes and a wheelie-cart with mathoms just made their way there, and I can’t say I miss anything much. (Especially the wedding-present mathom. Everybody who’s ever gotten married has one. I don’t, any longer; I just got rid of it, ha-ha! I know perfectly well I hadn’t ever used it; the manufacturer’s sticker was still on it.)
I trashed a bunch more Hispanic philology today, ha-ha again! I also found a folder of papers from college and the Department from Hell, and lo! not all of them sucked. Several did suck. But not all of them. My Merlin paper, which I found three separate versions of, wasn’t bad at all. A bit elementary, but not bad. And the “tener/haber/hacer” paper would be publishable if the actual writing weren’t so horrid and if that stupid bit at the end about theta-roles got chopped out.
The pod was delivered yesterday and rests in state in our driveway, the driver having done a really remarkable parking job. The basement and the guestroom are both nearly empty, there’s no more music in the house, and the living room completely fails to feel like my own familiar living room because the Barney-skin has been taken down and packed away, leaving a huge white alien expanse of wall.
There’s still a-plenty to do, but we’ve made a decent start, I think.
I got another “Straight Talk” fanmail today, this one asking rather diffidently if I would be willing to suggest some next steps after leaving graduate school. I’m not exactly a Horatio Alger story, but what the hell, I’ve got some disorganized thoughts, so why not?
The immediate need, of course, is for positive cash flow, which means work. Any work. Whatever work you can land; you won’t be doing it forever anyway. Temp agencies, limited-term work (colleges, universities, and government are major sources of this), waitronning, (the dreaded) retail, whatever. Just stop the financial bleeding, however you can.
You can’t afford to be disdainful of the workaday world at this point. In fact, in my experience the folks who have the worst time transitioning out of academia are the ones who never let go of it. Temping and retail are beneath them, they’re horribly underpaid for their intelligence and (perceived) social status, and every day they haul themselves home from work lamenting their former role and status as academicians. If this is you, train yourself out of it. It will blind you to opportunity where you are, waste precious brain-cycles that deserve better use, and make you so bitter and miserable that you may damage yourself permanently. Grieve if you need to, work through what happened to you if you need to (I did both), but don’t define yourself by your old academic identity. That’s gone. Time to roll up your sleeves and start building something else.
What’s more, that precise brand of disdain for the non-academic is what the rest of us hate most when we see it in academia. You won’t be doing yourself any favors in your workplace if you exhibit it; you must respect non-academic work and the people who do it. A well-honed curiosity will help you here. Do you know what a comptroller or a mid-level manager or a sysadmin actually does with her day? Well, don’t be contemptuous—watch and learn instead.
You must also respect time and experience (rather than hurdle-jumping) as determiners of one’s height on the employment totem pole. The people around you did their time as peons while you were in grad school. You need to do your time now; this is part of the opportunity cost you’re paying, and there’s no point in feeling all self-righteously indignant at it.
If you don’t see yourself in the previous few paragraphs, good for you! If you’re anything like me, you’ll get quite a charge out of becoming self-sufficient. Treasure that new confidence; it’s an asset.
If possible, the strategic thing to do is find work that will let you check off the ticky-box beside “supervisory experience” on future applications. If this means riding herd on slackjawed teenagers, so be it. This is the one thing I didn’t do during my topsy-turvy years that I wish I had. The other thing you want out of your first job(s) are good references—people future employers can call who will say nice things about you. Try to avoid working at places that “don’t give references.” Do so if you must, but you’re hurting yourself some.
I don’t usually have to tell ex-grad-students to be frugal, or how to be frugal. We already know how. Once you start having a bit of extra money, pay down your debts and build up your savings. You broke academia’s chains; why do you want the bank chaining you up? Set yourself free. Pay off your debts as fast as you can.
Once you’re solvent and indefinitely (if not necessarily ideally) employed, you can start looking around you a bit to see how the world works. See somebody doing a job you like? Ask them how they got there. Read blogs whose authors talk about their workplaces. Read the business pages in the local newspaper, especially the squibs about small local companies you won’t have heard of. Go to your public library and read the job ads in trade publications (it’s okay to start with newspapers, but you know what they say—that’s only a sliver of the available jobs).
Lots of books purport to tell you what you’ll be good at and enjoy doing. Any public-library reference librarian can help you find them. I never got much use out of them myself, but de gustibus non disputandum est—and I lucked into what I wanted to do anyway, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with these books to begin with. The one book I will recommend specifically is Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity (discussed briefly here), which advocates selecting a career path through varied experience rather than navel-gazing.
It may take years before you land the Ideal (enough) Job. You may cycle through several other jobs (I certainly did). You’ll probably make some mistakes (boy, did I ever!). You may need more education or specialized training. You almost certainly have to do some time on the bottom of the totem-pole. Back to basics: as long as you keep your financial head above water in the meantime, the occasional misstep or blind alley won’t kill you. You’re not in academia any more, so one strike doesn’t send you to the dugout forever. Stand up, dust off your knees, and get back out there.
That’s what I’ve got. For the most part, it’s what I did, and it worked out fine. There’s nothing special about me, either. When I left grad school, I was a shell-shocked zombie with damn-all by way of useful work experience. If I can get this far, most people reading this can probably surpass me.
And I hope they do.
I get quite a few hits on my complaint about my husband’s old PowerMac making a ton of fan noise. At last, at last, he took it in to the shop and had it checked out. (Oh, and for the record, the machine’s a G4/450, not 350 as I said at the time.)
Well. It wasn’t the main fan on the power supply, because that went dead ages ago. Why the machine never burned our house down I’m sure I don’t know.
The noise problem had to do with the video card fan. Solution: buy another video card. Which I have done, and let us all hope for the best.
The real-estate agent who found us our apartment asked me what I did for a living. I announced my profession with (forgivable, I hope) pride.
What amused me was how she latched onto it in her conversations with people who had rentals to show. “Yes, they’re moving here from Wisconsin, and she’s a LIBRARIAN, and…”
Those librarians. So trustworthy and reliable. Eminently desirable tenants. The best risks there are. Heh.
Not to mention that when I put “no debt” on our rental application, the agent looked at me a mite suspiciously and said, “I’ve never known anyone without some credit cards.”
Well, yeah, but I pay the things off completely every month. When the Madison house sells, we’ll be in the weird but rather nice position of owing nothing to anyone. (Not for long, not with real estate prices what they are where we’re going. But oh well.)
Of course, now I feel horrible about letting some money ride on our credit-cards for a month or two until the Salo cash flow stabilizes. It’s not that we don’t have the money (we do, here and there), it’s just that moving is bloody expensive, transferring money from here to there is a pain in the butt, and I have to protect our ready cash.
We’ll be fine, but it still feels icky. Be easier if my latest client would get around to paying my last invoice.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was today’s lesson in librarian finance.
All the beautiful people are at ALA just now. Me, I’m home working on moving and trying not to panic.
My shoulder is healing. I’ve gone off the horse pills because I don’t seem to need them, and because I’ve a morose certainty I shall need them when the stuff-transport gets underway in earnest. I’ve cut my ibuprofen doses a bit, too, and I only seem to need two doses a day, one after waking up and one before bedtime.
I discovered yesterday that the UW has a library fine charged against me. I have no idea why; I was never notified of an overdue or recall, nor was I ever sent notification of the fine. They’re holding my transcripts until this is cleared up, which makes me angry enough to spit—I don’t think this will imperil my job, but it theoretically could have, and it’s absurd that no attempt has been made to contact me about it. I’ve appealed the fine, but if I don’t hear from them PDQ, I’ll have to go be angry enough to spit in person. Which I don’t have time for, but oh well.
A couple-three people noticed me turning 33 yesterday. Nichole got me a CD by a librarian which has day-in-the-life librarian material on it. Very sweet of her, especially since she was already doing me a favor by looking after the Goths while we were gone. I do have the nicest friends anywhere.
I haven’t much to say about 33. It does feel rather freakish to find myself tooling down the road I set for myself at 30. My 20s were a checkerboard of falling down and dusting myself off and getting up and falling down again. It’s just weird not to have been derailed in a while.
If I were a hobbit, I’d just have come of age. I do feel an awful lot more adult now than I did at 18. Or 21.
Oh, yeah, and my mom and I have hit our elevenses together again, as we always do. Without revealing her actual age, I can say that the difference in age between us is such that we have identical-numeral birthdays (also known as birthdays divisible by 11) in the same year. Just a cute little numerological coincidence.
Today’s jobs: call PODS to change delivery site to the front yard (the driveway isn’t wide enough), get the cashier’s check for the apartment in the mail, go grocery shopping (and look for likely moving-box sources), haul some stuff to the St. Vinnie’s box up at the church, put a couple more things up on Freecycle, try not to melt from the heat.