Job interview?!?

This afternoon a phone call came in: one of the westside community colleges.

Was I the person at this number who had applied for a full-time teaching job in the English department there?

Why, yes…

Was I still interested in the job?

Absolutely!

Seconds later, she had me signed up for an interview next Tuesday afternoon.

Well. That was a surprise. It’s been three months since I sent in that application. I figured never to hear from them. By now, I imagined, they must have hired whomever they had in mind when they started the search. Because the community college district’s application form requires you to enter the dates of your degrees and the inclusive dates of all your jobs, there’s no way you can hide your age from a search committee. They don’t have to see me to know I’m too old to restart a teaching career.

It’s so radically unlikely they’ll hire me that for a moment I was given pause: why jump through the interview hoops when what’s on the other side of the hoop is a brick wall? On the other hand: why not? Nothing ventured, nothing et-ceteraed.

Truth is, I’ve pretty much adjusted myself, mentally, to the idea of not working full-time. I wonder if I really want a full-time job.

On reflection, though: cobbling together a living with adjunct teaching, Social Security, blogging, and sporadic editing adds up to more than full-time work at very low pay. Just now I’m hardly doing any work for the Great Desert University but I’m putting in 12- to 15-hour days, every day: seven days a week. There’s not even time to clean the house. The only breaks I’m getting from the work are choir practice on Wednesday evening and senior choir performances on Sunday morning.

Today I made a conscious decision to loaf. I should’ve been reading student papers but just couldn’t face it. A day of idling meant…

• writing two blog posts
• contending with the daily onslaught of e-mail messages (about 70 on a slow day);
• downloading and unzipping two files from our India client, after Tina’s system wouldn’t break into them;
• inspecting and assessing them, then sending them along to her;
• cruising news sites and PF blogs in search of some inspiration for the next post;
• finishing a proposal for an online course at PVCC;
• chatting with a client editor over the phone;
• reading the rest of a detective novel’s page proofs, about 100 pages…

Oh, and repairing the toilet, after having made a run on the hardware store for parts.

It’s safe to estimate that a nine-month salary at one of Maricopa County’s colleges would start at about what I earn on a twelve-month contract at GDU. The amount I earn today, over twelve months, was about the average pay for community college faculty eight or ten years ago. On a nine-month basis.

A full-time teaching job in the community colleges would entail actual work, something I’ve learned to evade delegate in my present position. However, 15 hours a day of nonstop labor on various freelance and contract enterprises strikes me as something akin to work. And the pay works out to something less than minimum wage.

If I have to work that hard, I might as well be earning a decent living and, while we’re at it, getting a few benefits. Maybe I could afford to hire a plumber to fix the toilet.