Caveat Lector

Found a few things out last Friday, as I shuttled between work and SLIS and my friends’ apartment.

First, I found out that nobody’s going to admit I’ve completed my practicum until I’ve spat out ten pages of I-don’t-know-what (I’m told “reflection” is the way to go) about it. Sigh. Hokay. I can do ten pages.

Second, I found out that my friend the SLIS librarian thinks my Ph.D counteroffer (they find me job, I teach for them) is interesting. She thinks this in a detached, not entirely effectual, unenthusiastic sort of way. So I’m left to my own devices again.

Eh, well, so. I took the next steps. Got an email from the head of Digital Content thanking me for a bit of information I tossed his way; I acknowledged with an invitation to buy him lunch. Meanwhile, I’m sizing up Ken “Big Deal” Frazier from a distance, since one thing I did get from the SLIS librarian is the sort of “you really ought to meet him” thing that is the twenty-first century equivalent of the letter of introduction. (It lets me say “Hey, you don’t know me, but so-and-so says I really ought to meet you…” and have some chance of him taking me seriously.) So it goes.

I actually don’t dislike this part of the game nearly as much as one would think a basically introverted individual would. It’s fun to listen to smart, committed people talking about what they do and why they do it. And whether through sheer luck or some vestige of good management, I don’t typically have to get all self-conscious about such meetings; my workaday self makes a decent enough impression as is.

What I hate, of course, is the uncertainty that makes all this necessary. These lunches are a lot more fun when they’re no-stakes.

Anyway. I also figured out why I hate the “describe your ideal job” question. The emphasis is all in the wrong place. I don’t get job satisfaction from a job description, which is what this question expects me to spit back. Sure, there are things I like to do, but that’s the least of what makes me happy in a job. Truly, the least. I’m the chick who left a cushy sinecure for a vastly-lower-paying data-entry job that was murder on my hands, remember? And I was still far happier in the latter job than the former. That’s me. You can’t make me happy with a job description.

Besides, I’ve never, not once, had a job description that I didn’t change. Not once. Not even my first job ever: at sixteen, I started as busgirl and was speedily “promoted” to stockroom factotum. That’s just the cold truth, the way the universe deforms itself around me. I don’t sit around waiting for somebody to hand me interesting things to do. I go and find them. I don’t accept a job as handed to me; I figure out how to do it more accurately and efficiently. I don’t reject a new thing with “that’s not in my job description;” I invariably say, “well, I don’t actually know how to do this, but if you give me some time I’ll take a whack at figuring it out.”

(Scutwork, too. Scutwork is the single best way I know of getting a handle on an unfamiliar system. I do the work without an understanding of the system at first, of course, but doing it yields clues over time about the system’s structure and functioning, allowing me to build up my mental picture of How Things Work. Eventually, I’m able to take on the complicated interesting bits, and all because of scutwork. I never turn down scutwork, and I don’t quite understand people who do. How do they learn anything?)

So, I ask you, what is the point of me shopping by job description? If I’m only going to carve my own niche anyway, because I always, always do?

What I need, fundamentally, to make me happy in a job is permission to carve my own niche. Just show me the goal, wind me up, and set me down on a flat surface; I’ll take care of the rest. Employers who let me do this love me to pieces, finding that I make everyone’s life a little easier, and I love them right back, regardless of the job description. Employers who put up roadblocks in front of me lose me in a burst of hurt amazement, stricken stupefaction that anyone would want to stop me making things better.

This has a few implications, I think. I can be bound to particular outcomes, but not to particular processes. If I think a process is stupid, don’t get in my way while I fix it; I’ll resent that something fierce. By all means explain to me why the process is the way it is—new information talks me down easily out of a process snit. And by all means start me off on an existing process—that’s scutwork, it’s how I learn. But don’t treat your processes as if they were the Mount Sinai tablets in front of me. I’ll break ‘em. Just watch me. And I’ll lose a lot of respect for you to boot.

It also means that people who are afraid I want their job either because I take on new projects, both scutwork and show-work, with wild abandon (which looks like brownnosing to status-conscious types) or because I want to know how they do their job (which looks like job-stealing but isn’t; it’s just me trying to build my mental systems model) need to calm the hell down. I’ve had this happen; it was ludicrous. I don’t want somebody else’s job. I want sufficient autonomy to build my own. There’s a vast difference.

(The only time I want somebody else’s job is when somebody is doing it wrong and stubbornly resists clue-by-fours. I will cop to hating the sight of work done badly, enough to try to oust offenders.)

I mean, I could see an issue if I was a cherry-picker, glomming onto the glam-work and leaving everybody else to toil. But I don’t work that way, honestly. I take on anything and everything, scutwork and glam-work alike. (In management class, I took on the lit review for the group project because nobody else wanted to.) Nor do I mind sharing the fun stuff as long as the division of labor makes some remote sort of sense. I can’t work with cherry-pickers, actually. It’s not because they bogart the fun stuff; on some level it’s all fun stuff to me. It’s because at some point, cherry-pickers invariably get in the way of the work in their relentless quest for the good bits. This drives me bananas. Utterly ape.

So that’s one thing I need: a nice piece of marble to carve to my liking. The other thing I need is an overarching goal I can get behind. I don’t have to be responsible for that goal; I don’t have to choose it. I just have to know what it is, agree with it, and be able to take a peek at the big picture now and then. This data-entry job? I’m building a database of census information that historians, demographers, and even civil engineers are going to get a lot of mileage out of. That’s a worthwhile thing to do. It’s cool. Data entry is relentlessly uncool, but I can do relentlessly uncool things with commitment and total equanimity if I can align myself with the goal at hand.

(There’s a Dragonhunt NPC, liaison for the Ilium mob, who is quite contented with his job because his fun, enjoyable work never involves activities he finds unsavory. He’s quite aware of what his employers are up to; he has to be. And he doesn’t find all of it ethical or worthwhile. But as long as he isn’t personally doing anything evil, he’s cool with being a cog in the evil machine. I can’t do that. A viewpoint more antithetical to mine would be hard to find. Even Renate turned this kind of deal on its ear, when she squealed to the press about the off-the-books nature of Troubleshooting. She, like me, has to be in alignment with the basic goals and modus operandi of the operation before she can give it her whole heart.)

I don’t know that this brings me a whole lot closer to having an answer to that damnable “describe your ideal job” question. I hope so, though, because I need a usable soundbite eftsoons and right speedily.