is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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It's like a jungle sometimes.
There are lots of reasons for not hiring people, even qualified people, for jobs and, since I'm an academic, I have a LOT of experience not getting jobs. People who want to be professors usually apply to 100 to 200 jobs a year when they are job-searching, and if they're lucky they get 10 interviews. 10 interviews out of 200 applications is a good year. Some years you'll work your ass off at all those applications, and get nothing at all, not even any CHANCES at something. And that just is how it works. (I explained this to a friend of mine in a different industry once, when she told me she felt like a loser because she came in second for a job, and it was the only job she applied for. I was all: those are some good odds. You are not a loser. And so on.)
I hope you know this: It is never the case that you are hired only for your qualifications. You have to strike your potential co-workers as someone who won't make the office hell to work in, and so on. That stuff matters. But then there's the other stuff. Stuff that, no matter how hard you work, or how nice or personable you are, will render your nice qualified ass fully rejected. Sometimes that's fair enough, just the way it is, like when a panel of five people who don't get along have to hire someone, and so the hire is the result of a power struggle, which rarely means that the best or even the most qualified candidate gets the job. It's lame and depressing but that's politics.
But this isn't politics. Lately I've had more than one incident of not getting a job for really weird reasons. These are, of course, tiny freelance jobs, so perhaps the selection process is even more iffy. But, for instance, I recently took a copy editing test with many different sections, to see if I could be admitted to a training program to start copy editing philosophy books. It was a really good test--it would be impossible to cheat on it and it truly did test a lot of different skills. I kind of enjoyed it, because I kind of enjoy nitpicky stuff like that. On one section the instructions were: "Edit this section of notes as if it were going to the author and then to the typesetter. You are not expected to know and follow any particular note style; concentrate on making the notes consistent within themselves." That's what I did. Then the feedback I got from the editor said that I had done very very well on all the sections, but that in the notes section I hadn't been close enough to the style of the press in question. But the test was to test whether I was going to be trained to work for that press, right? And the instructions didn't tell me to try to be like any particular press style. So my conclusion is that they just don't want to train anyone right now, and they let me take the test as a favor to someone. Oh well. Do I write back and suggest they change the wording of the instructions for that portion of the test? Probably best just to let it be, right? Right.
Speaking of sexism (as I was last night), that rejection of my potential copy editing skills has nothing to do with gender, but it is a small version of another rejection I once got, that did have to do with gender. Once I interviewed for a professor job at a small northeastern liberal arts college. In the interview one of the tenured women pushed me and pushed me on my teaching style, because she was worried about how women tend to have problems asserting authority. That is not at all a problem I have, but I was trying to tread a complicated line in my answer because I was being interviewed by one woman and three men, all philosophers. You can't come on strong with the men because then they'll be afraid that you're too pushy (because pushy women are scary, remember, but pushy men are simply forthright). But finally I said to her, after she kept pushing the issue, "Listen, my students know that I am there to help them with their work, and to discuss difficult concepts with them, but I am not their mom." That's all I said. She was satisfied.
Then, when I got rejected, I asked the male professor who headed the search if he had any constructive criticism for me (perhaps that was my mistake, but I do think it taught me something I needed to learn, even if it's not something I can fix on my own), and he said: "We felt that you belonged in a big research institution because you might not be up to nurturing the kind of students we have at a small liberal arts college." What that means in code is: "YOU ARE A COLD SCARY BITCH." That statement is of course not true, as anyone who knows me, or as any of my students at the TWO SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES AT WHICH I'VE TAUGHT, SUCCESSFULLY, would tell you. But that was the reason he gave when asked for a reason. It shocked me because this professor had written a really good book on ethics. I thought he was one of my peeps. He is not.
Anyway, that's like the copy editing test example because I was found to be at fault for doing what I was asked to do.
It's like a jungle sometimes. Welcome to the jungle. Jungle love, it's driving me mad, it's making me crazy.
I'm not sure whether calling bad human behavior jungle-like isn't actually insulting to animals, who have no use for the guile and dissembling that seems to be so important to people who are looking to hire someone, and the rest of us humans.
2:07 p.m. - June 30, 2008
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