Well, there’s an opening in Atlanta, at a very fine university. They’re looking for a managing editor to run a medical research journal. My résumé and cover letter are ready to send, and now all that remains is click an e-mail button and send the stuff winging its way through the ether to the hiring committee. A statement of desired salary is required for consideration. One of my mentors thinks I can probably ask around $90,000 and get $85,000; another is advising me to ask $90,000 to $100,000, plus relocation costs.
That’s an astonishing amount of money to me. The cost of living in Atlanta is slightly lower than it is here, and a quick perusal of the real estate listings shows some very sweet places for what I can get for my house.
So…why haven’t I sent my stuff?
Well. The truth is, I’m not at all sure I want to work that hard.
When I first saw the ad, I figured the journal was probably a semimonthly or, at most, a monthly. Closer study, however, reveals that the thing comes out weekly! It publishes a hundred pages a week!! The M.E. has seven staffers, more contributing editors than a person can easily count, and an editorial board of two score medical researchers.
Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, our busiest client journal, comes out six times a year and keeps my most ambitious editor busy most of the time. Our client editor is not very demanding and in fact discourages us from riding herd on the writers very hard.
This thing I’m looking at is the real McCoy. It follows AMA style, and I expect it’s very well edited, indeed. The senior editor, who is in New York, can’t possibly have time to comb the worst of the nits out of several hundred manuscript pages a week, and so those seven editors (one of the seven underlings is an admin assistant, leaving six associate editors and one managing editor) are dealing with some seriously raw copy. Just because you have an M.D. doesn’t mean you can write your way out of a paper bag.
All of which goes to say that this job could very well amount to a 90-hour-a-week gig.
I find myself wondering if I want to work 90 hours a week. Or any hours a week. Maybe I’d rather spend the rest of my life loafing, living on savings and Social Security, and teaching a few freshman comp classes.
You know, I’ve become so disaffected with my job that I feel I don’t want to work at all. Not at GDU, not anywhere. I stay away from the place as much as possible, because no one notices whether I’m there or not and because the two-hour round-trip commute feels like an utter waste of time (so does sitting around the office with little or nothing to do). My house is so much work it expands to fill all of my waking hours: I can easily keep myself busy from 5:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night with yardwork, pool work, housework, grocery shopping, the Workman Waltz, financial management, blogging, and freelancing. Who has time for a job?
Especially for a job that’s going to soak up every living, breathing minute of your conscious existence?
Plus it’s a long haul from here to Atlanta. I don’t know anyone there, and I don’t make friends easily. I’d have to sell my house, which could take several months. Where would I live until I got the cash from this place to buy a new place? I’d have to rent.
Of course, with a real, living wage I could afford to rent: the proceeds from this house could go straight into savings. Or it could be used to pay off the downtown house, freeing my son to quit his hated job and go back to school.
And it must be said that if I could hold a job like that even for three years, I could recover handsomely from the crash of the Bush economy. Three years of frugal living on a decent salary would leave me well set for retirement; five years would guarantee security for the rest of my life. By then the recession will have passed (we hope) and my savings would allow me to buy a nice place in New Mexico and live happily ever after.
If I lived to see an ever after…
Image:
Midtown Atlanta by Evilarry at Wikipedia Commons
“I find myself wondering if I want to work 90 hours a week. Or any hours a week. Maybe I’d rather spend the rest of my life loafing, living on savings and Social Security, and teaching a few freshman comp classes.
You know, I’ve become so disaffected with my job that I feel I don’t want to work at all. Not at GDU, not anywhere.”
The “you too?!?” of this post is startling! I know I’m not old enough to claim the right to loaf the rest of my life, but I feel exactly the same way. I hate my job so much that even I, an acknowledged workaholic, feel allergic to work itself.
I’m even tempted to throw over a potentially very lucrative temp to perm position because I don’t want to deal with anyone in this particular area again. But I haven’t yet. And I’m still sitting on my crabbiness about it. But guess what? That position is in Atlanta too!
We could do this. *shrug* I’m half joking, but it’d be kind of interesting. 🙂
@ Revanche: Maybe it’s just time to find a new line of work. That brings me back to the essential problem: I don’t know what I wanna be when I grow up.
Well, what the heck: I sent the application, asking an outrageous amount of money.
But “outrageous” may be in the eye of the beholder. A colleague who came here to take a job with responsibilities comparable to mine and requiring a skill set identical to mine earned $30,000 more than I do, on a nine-month basis! If his salary had been prorated out over my twelve-month contract, he would’ve been earning twice what I earn. That is, his hourly rate was about twice mine. He soon became disaffected with the wackiness that is the Great Desert University and returned whence he came, where he found a much nicer job than the one he’d left. His replacement? She’s earning in the six figures!!!!!
So…maybe 90 to 100 grand is not so outrageous.
Well, Revanche, if we both end up in Atlanta, we’ll have to get together in person!
To be sure, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up either. [I’m trying to divorce my identity from my profession, at least a little bit.]
This temp to perm position is unappealing because while the work is a challenge (plus!), and I can negotiate for mucho dinero and expenses, likely, (plus!) it requires that I clean up the mess that was created by my current employers (minus!) and continue to deal in a political snake pit that may or may not respect me as an individual when separated from my current crazies (minus!)
I may not be great at math, but I can see that the situation isn’t overwhelmingly positive. Then again, it could just be temporary, permanent if I want it. Eh. Round and round I go, and will until something in the negotiating process or my instinct kicks in solidly with an answer.
And you know what? For your skill set and the responsibilities they’re asking for, 90-100 cannot be outrageous. They were paying my ME for less work, specifically because I was doing his job for years, and to put out a monthly pub: 120K plus benefits. Really really good benefits.
Let me (us) know what comes of the application!
Why not send it in? You could always refuse it later.
Housing is surprisingly cheap in Atlanta. If you live in the right place, you can take the train to work (depending on where you work). Lots of energy. Lots of culture.
Good luck!
Absolutely send in the resume. It doesn’t hurt to find out more information. Maybe the co-workers would be really nice people, maybe they would let you work from home part of the time. Who knows? I’ve decided that since I hate my job to apply for things that might even be of marginal interest.
@ Synapse: It’s on its way to Atlanta…probably got there several hours ago.
@ frugalscholar: I was AMAZED at the prices. Places that would cost upwards of $350,000 here are selling in the middle 200’s. There are even halfway decent-looking places for under two hundred grand. No clue about the neighborhoods, though.
@ Revanche: O…M…G…! My salary is $62,500, and I oversee production of six journals: 1 bimonthly, 3 quarterlies, a triannual, and an annual hard-cover book. I knew people were underpaid here, but this is ridiculous. Whatever you do, don’t move to Arizona for a job!!!!
@ Janet: Yeah, when I was teaching I reached the same conclusion. It took three years to land a job (evidently an underpaid one), but the efforts finally panned out.
Just be careful driving in Atlanta – I swear every other street is “Peach” something.
I worked there one year on a new plant startup (two weeks there, two weeks home). Nice city, good people, slower pace than I’m used to. I really liked it. If there would have been GPS back then, it would have been a LOT more fun LOL.
Wow. That’s an insane and awesome opportunity. It’s probably something I’d take if I were single, because while I like my free time–I also like having jobs that I can get kinda lost in, at least while I’m working.
It’s not JAMA, is it? That’s the only medical journal my specialized library gets, and I’m impressed by its regular & weekly publication.
Good luck either way!
“Don’t move to Arizona for a job!”
Gotcha. But let’s keep in mind he’s that overpaid because he’s a dunce who made his life revolve around the higher-up. Literally catering to higher-up’s every move, sneeze, sniffle and whim. He was willing to sacrifice soul, spine, dignity and family for that salary, but he also didn’t do any real, professional work for it.
Keep us updated!