Replies and Expectations, Part III

continued from the last post...

All I wanted to do on Thursday morning, well after I'd gotten dressed and had prepped myself for the interview, was sleep. Maybe you folks know this and have dealt with it before, but when you can't sleep for hours on end, and then finally fall asleep only to be jolted out of it an hour or two later, you can't function. All you want to do is go back to sleep. If you can't or are otherwise not allowed to go back to sleep? Well, tough shit, you have to face the day feeling like death for the first hour or three that you're once more awake, until (if you're me, anyway) you can get enough caffeine and nicotine into your bloodstream to be mobile and a semi-productive member of society.

Daisy, the sweetheart of a wife that she is, offered to drive me to the interview (as she went to the university and therefore knew where it was and where the buildings were that I needed to be in), even after working a full overnight shift. She did this knowing full well that the interview would take two hours -- I was told it would -- and that for those two hours she'd be left to her own devices to sleep in the car, wander the campus, etc. She did this without question or complaint, and when I offered to go by myself she waved me off, as she said she knew that driving in rush hour traffic and trying to find the place to go, on a campus on which I'd never before set foot, would stress the hell out of me.

She's right, of course, but I could've managed.

Anyway.

The interview was fine. Overall, I mean.

It did indeed last two hours (a little over two hours, actually), and the ladies who interviewed me were really nice, open and easy to talk to, and very understanding about my need to reschedule (I did not, of course, tell them the real reason why I rescheduled). The meat-and-potatoes of it is that the position is full-time while it lasts, and its duration is six months from the day it starts, whenever that may be. I'd be replacing two women who are going on maternity leave at the same time -- but they're only hiring one person. Those two women's duties would be split half-and-half between me and the rest of the office staff, and time/work would be balanced out. The position also entails a lot of erratic hours and locales, including such things as going to career day festivals on Saturdays and Sundays, some of which could be up to sixty miles away or more.

This, of course, didn't fill me with a lot of want for the position. I mean, driving to a high school or community college here in town and running a booth for a few hours on a weekday is one thing. Driving sixty or more miles away to do the same thing on a Saturday or Sunday is quite another...especially in the winter.

But, a 50/50 shot at those sorts of things? Eh, those aren't bad odds. I also made sure to play up the fact that my car is falling apart and has 233,000 miles on it, because that may have helped in any other situation...until I was told that they also use rental cars for the longer trips. Shit.

Okay, well, that's not too bad. Still.

The interview consisted of three parts -- the first was a sit-down conference room session with the ladies who'd interviewed me on the phone. They asked several questions which were similar to the ones I'd been asked on the phone, and then several new ones. Again, I could tell they were impressed by my answers, and the answers to some of those questions seemed to mildly shock them by how on-the-ball and, ahem, intelligent I was in casual conversation. At least that's the impression I got, anyhow.

From that point I was very quickly ushered into a larger conference room with what had to be an eighty-inch television screen hooked up to a computer. It was on this screen that I would be giving my presentation. I'd told them before that all I needed was a computer with which to login to my email, as I'd emailed it to myself. Well, yes, this room did have that...hooked up to the massive screen, which in turn was displayed to a room full of probably twenty-ish people, none of which had interviewed me before (aside from the aforementioned three ladies, I mean).

What. The shit.

I was told I was going to give the presentation to the interviewers and a chancellor, not an audience -- and definitely not an audience of which I had no clue who they were -- actual college students, vice-presidents, chancellors, other staff? Who knows. I wasn't told. I do know that the children of at least two of the admissions staff members were there...children who were college-aged, of course. But I wasn't expecting a full room of people. At all. Hoo boy.

I put on my game face, brought up the presentation, and went through it. I did the best I could, of course, and I could tell that it was impressing most of them -- which sort of surprised me, after all, since I knew little about the university, its programs, or really anything else, and had made it pretty vague in several places because of that.

When it was over, there was the ten-minute question-and-answer session...during which I answered what questions I could under what was, I'm certain now, extreme duress (but didn't appear that way on the surface), everyone seemed satisfied, and we dismissed.

Again, people seemed impressed -- I want to stress that. I wasn't getting weird looks or confused stares or anything of that sort, but nods of understanding and smiles, and when I asked the interviewing ladies afterwards if that was the sort of presentation they were looking for, they told me that it was and that I hit all the bases they were looking for. So that's good, at least.

The final part of the interview was afterwards -- a walk across campus to have a one-on-one interview with the university's vice chancellor. During the walk, which was led by the lady clearly in charge of the entire interview process and not the one who I'd been emailing/talking to on the phone prior, we had a rather loose, interesting conversation about the job itself and about the prospects of it.

"We can't really get people to interview for these temp positions," she said, "because people find out it's a temp position and they're no longer interested. I mean, it's a good job, but most people want something permanent, you know?"

"Oh, I understand that," I said. "But, does being hired even in a temp position like this make them eligible for internal-only university job postings?"

"Absolutely," she said.

"So how many of the folks you've hired on as temps -- playing the odds here, of course -- have turned their position into a full hire after the temp time period ends? Or, barring that, how many have been 'installed' into other open positions upon the end of their temp services?"

"Quite a few of them," she replied. "That's not necessarily the case with the position you're interviewing for, since it's the maternity leave thing, but we've had temps who in the past have gone on to work in numerous departments around the university as soon as they've finished. One of them works in academic advising now, another went somewhere else..." she trailed off.

"So, basically, it's a 'once you're in, you're in' scenario?"

"A lot of the time, yes," she said.

This was a big question I'd had since the beginning, as you know -- since it seemed like an awful lot of work, time spent, and calories burnt to have what amounted to three or four different, separate interviews for a temporary job. I understand that part of the job is being the "face of the university" at events and the like, but come on, it's not that complicated. The job at its core is little more than a traveling salesman. Go places, sell the university, leave.

After the walk across campus, I was interviewed for about half an hour by the vice chancellor -- who was very nice and kind, of course, but the kind of woman you could tell was deathly serious and all-business about her job and about the people she was interviewing. And, of course, I got the always-asked so why aren't you still teaching somewhere? question that everybody in every interview asks me.

I had to give my standard response of there's no teaching jobs available, and if there are, they don't hire anyone without four degrees and ten publications, and if they do, they won't pay a living wage, and as a married man I can't live on or support the wife on $12,000 a year anymore, etc etc.

She gave me a novel idea, though, and that was sending an email to the Department of English chairpersons at the universities and small colleges around the area (including this one) and making a direct inquiry on whether there were teaching positions available, adjunct or otherwise. I've done that with my former university, obviously, and one of the smaller schools up here, but I figured that all of the larger schools would have some sort of employment portal and/or online system I'd have to go through, as I tended to see adjunct instructor positions posted all the time on job boards from many different schools.

Anyway. I think it went well with the vice chancellor. She explained to me some of the deeper details of the position and informed me that there were four people interviewing for the position -- all of them were interviewing this week, and by the end of next week they'd be contacting the candidates to let them know yes or no. As I was one of four, that's a 25% chance I'll be asked to be hired. I also confirmed that a large number of temporary employees do indeed continue within the university somewhere almost immediately when their temporary contract expires.

That 25% figure, however, brought me back to a conversation I'd had with Daisy earlier that morning:

"If they offer you the job on the spot, are you going to take it?" she asked.

"No," I replied flatly. "It's not my ideal position, which you know, and it's temporary. I'm still waiting on [company] to get back to me, since that's apparently in the works as well. And that job is a full-time desk job that wouldn't require me to drive all around the tri-state area and is quite literally three minutes from home."

By the time the interview was over, I probably would have taken the job if they'd offered it to me on the spot. And therein lies the conundrum.

Look, it's not a bad job. At least not from what I learned about it during the interview process. Is it travel? Yes. Is it at times going to be inconvenient and/or difficult? Also yes. Will I have to make myself look ultra-presentable almost every day, including (probably) wearing a tie and button-down shirts? More than likely. But the pay is good while it lasts, the people I'd be working with seem extremely nice (as well as extremely competent) and I'd be in academia again. Not teaching, no, but in academia.

Driving back home, I told Daisy the entire story of the interview (or, well, the Reader's Digest version, anyway). It's a lucrative opportunity; I won't lie. But it's not a forever thing, it will end in six months, and there is the rather large possibility that when it does end, I'll be stuck right back where I was before -- where I am now, jobless and searching. I can take risks, yes, and were I still single and living on my own I would absolutely jump at the chance to work a job like this even for six months. But I'm not anymore. I have a responsibility now not only to myself, but to my wife and to our bills and other monthly expenses. I've been a damn good employee at every job I've worked, but even with that I'm not sure it justifies the risk of once more being unemployed in six months, because it's not like they can guarantee I'll get some other position within the university after that point.

On the other hand, there's the job with Daisy's company, with the wheels still in motion for it, and me waiting to hear if they're actually going to hire me and when. When I got home from the interview I called the HR guy and left a message on his machine in the office, basically repeating everything I'd said in my email to him several days prior. That's all I can do, really; if they want to hire me, they'll offer me a job there. If they don't, then they won't.

"I'm open to advice here on what to do," I told Daisy, "if both places offer me positions."

She suggested I take whichever one offers me the job first, and if I don't like it, to quit and take the other one -- a heavy implication being that she doesn't think I'd like working for her company at all. And I probably wouldn't. But it would be stable and more convenient.

I did the math; working the university position for six months would pay me more, even after taxes, than I made all of last year. Doing the math for the job with Daisy's company for a full year pays a little more, but it's a negligible amount.

I don't know, folks. I really don't know. Neither job is my ideal career, obviously, but it will provide us with money, money with which we could do the stuff we need to do around the house -- such as pay off our credit cards more easily and eventually get a table and chairs, a larger TV, and a newer car for me. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that whatever job I get now will not be an ideal one, but something I have to do in order to continue paying bills and supporting the household. So, to a large extent, any job I choose to take (if anyone offers me one anyhow) is the lesser of two evils, with the greater evil being that we can't support ourselves.