Another Day in Paradise

Today the weather finally got warm, but not hot. The sun was bright and soothing, but not painful or oppressive. I got up late and there was no traffic to speak of, since all the 9-to-5ers were already at work, so I just went right down Mission Street where the cars go. There were delivery trucks double-parked on almost every block, and almost no cars, so I was not in danger and not a bother to others and I zipped in to school. I arrived at school and found a lot of relaxed staff and students sitting outdoors in the sun and chatting. No one seems to be under pressure on a Friday at 2-year colleges. I was only there to go to a "computer orientation" we have to attend to get our new computer accounts, with GroupWise (our new e-mail program). We went to the assigned room but no one appeared to teach us, so we all started to chew the fat. There is juicy gossip: some evil student has been hacking into some place they should not be from our system, and has provoked complaints from off-campus authorities. We have a week or so to solve it internally before the campus webmaster takes Draconian action to isolate our labs from the Internet, which would mess us up. But they are not my classes, and evidently the Cisco networking folks have it under control. After about 15 minutes we found out that our instructor was impatiently waiting for us in a different room, and we went there for the training. It was supposed to be a 3-hour training, but our department head convinced them that since we were the computer networking department, we might be expected to understand it a bit faster than the other departments, and we finished in 40 minutes or so.

It was just too beautiful to work, so I rode to a bike shop to see what I could do about my chain, which has a frozen link and has been bothering me. I left the bike there to have the chan and rear sprockets replaced and walked down Ocean street to my local Borders, where after about 45 minutes I finally found the political science section. I got The Chomsky Reader which I have been trying to buy for weeks. I started it, and I expect to become a flaming Communist any day now, with the perfect answer for everything and an intolerable burden to all my friends and associates, filled with vitriolic abuse of the entire American way of life. It's a good thing I live in California, where none of that will be noticed in the slightest.

Perhaps I should mention that Chomsky is not really a Communist, but he does oppose the Vietnam war, the current Gulf war, globalization, and many other right-wing litmus tests of moral worth, so he might as well be. I paid cash for the book, but no doubt by mentioning his name on a weblog I am now listed as an enemy of the state. If I vanish into John Ashcroft's dungeons and never return, please take one day a year and ceremonially ignore a chatter in my memory.

After my interview for the Oakland job, which did not go well, my prospective employer told me to re-write my cover letter and expect him at my class on Tuesday. I did that, but he did not show up, call, or e-mail me. I took this as a gentle hint that I was not going to get that job, but then he e-mailed me and said he would come Thursday. I also observed that he sent another somewhat frantic e-mail to our department seeking more candidates, so I think he has discovered that it's either me or nobody. Anyway he showed up in class, and seemed not to pay much attention to what happened, but he seemed somewhat impressed by the notes I print for the students. This guy really makes me nervous for some reason. His presence makes my throat dry and I long for a drink of water; at some level I must be scared of him. I don't know why. It might be just because he is black and 7 feet tall, or just the situation of him judging me, but he provokes the response that being called to the principal's office in 3rd grade did. In any case, I am content to pass through this process, and I expect to be less nervous in future interviews after this practice.

Teaching seems a lot like being a cab driver or a hair stylist to me: you are essentially an independent contractor with a generally hostile, exploitive and abusive management. So you have to jump through hoops, be degraded, and judged by random unfair criteria every semester or so, and when that nonsense stops you can go to a room and teach a class. I therefore don't really care what this guy thinks, or what his silly goals or buzzwords are. I am merely waiting for this nonsense to be over, so that they will let me teach a class. I think musicians feel the same way: agents and record labels and promoters and movie producers and such parasites bother them about annoying stuff, take their pound of flesh, and then leave so they can play music, which is what they really want to do.

This Oakland job should be interesting. I expect that the students will not really be as bad as the interviewer said they would be, but I also expect that half or more of them will quit and he won't like that. But I may be able to actually help some of them, and that's why I am doing it. I also think I should stay fully employed when it is possible, as the devil finds work for idle hands. Even though it looks to me as if this program will be declared a failure soon, I am not refusing to get involved because I don't really take the opinion of my co-called bosses that seriously. I did the same thing at the Marin college I taught at: I was hired to teach an introductory course in computers and given a set of specifications that had not been updated since 1978. I asked "do you really want me to teach these people DOS?" and the answer was "updating that thing is not my job." I asked the department head what I should do, but he was too busy to talk to me, and since he was also the guy whose job it had been to update the course specifications since 1978, I decided not to wait for his attention. I just ignored the specifications and taught the students Windows and Office, which was what they were there to learn. And, as I expected, after 10 weeks the department head called me in to complain about what I was doing, but during my explanation he noticed that I had written a clear syllabus, and his eyes lit up when he realized that he could just white my name off it, write his name on it, and that would be the update he was supposed to do, so his objections faded.

It is a curious moral position to work for bosses you do not respect, but I think most people are in that position. Even though the government leaders, college administration and other big shots feel all important, in fact they are neither important nor long-lasting. Like the other craftsmen on Earth, I think my job is to do my trade well, and the powers above me will come and go, changing one stupid system for another. If I ignore most of what they say and just do a good job teaching, their presence will just not matter much to me or my students.

I am reminded of my days in medical research. The institute I worked at was led by an 80-year-old world-famous eye surgeon. He made many millions of dollars a year, and people flew from all over the Earth to have him work on their eyes. He had invented a few surgical procedures, and he was regarded as the last word in his specialty. He had a warm, gentlemanly, pig-headed style of administration and reminded me very much of Ronald Reagan. Everything was completely clear to him, and anything he did not understand was just some nonsense you should stop talking about.

This fellow loved to write memos. Every week or two the people at the institute would get memos, usually asking you to do something that would waste a lot of your time. After he noticed my existence he started sending them to me. The one I remember asked me to go find somebody with a video camera and prepare to videotape a visiting speaker that was coming. As I recall, I spent a lot of time figuring out who I needed to talk to and how to do that, and I ultimately found out that it could not be done with the resources available, and the more experienced people told me to just forget about it. I think in fact that talk was canceled and he said nothing further to me about it. But the star of the institute told me that part of the secret of his success had been that he just threw away every memo he got from the boss without even bothering to read them, and he had always done that. I was horrified, but I see that he had the right idea in a lot of ways.

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