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Careers

Wah! I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up

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So I’m plodding across the freeway and thinking how much I hate wasting 90 minutes to two hours driving back and forth to the campus when it occurs to me that what I really hate is my job.

Oops! Say what? I hate my job? Come ON! Sure, the pay’s not equitable (my new opposite number is coming in at six figures on a 9-month contract, very annoying), but it’s still a decent living and it ain’t cleaning terlets or flipping burgers. The problem is, I am soooo flicking bored!

Writing the index for the current issue of the renaissance and medieval history annual meant having to read all that stuff AGAIN. Once was quite enough. Twice was more than enough. Three times is decidedly not a charm.While a couple of the essays are pretty interesting (relatively speaking), the archival study where the author notes every single sale of every tiny plot of land in the ninth-century Spanish March, with the name of each buyer and seller, was almost as mind-numbing as the excruciatingly detailed analytical comparison of Bromyard’s Tractatus iuris ciuilis et canonici ad moralem materiam applicati with his Summa praedicantium, a lively work when set next to the endless dissection of Milton’s educational theory and practice.

The index took all day Friday, all day Saturday, half of Sunday, and all of Monday and Tuesday to complete. By the time I sent it off to one of the RAs to be edited, at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, I thought I was gunna die.

Best jobs, worst jobs

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J.D. Roth’s Labor Day post at Get Rich Slowly, in which he recites all the jobs he’s ever held and asks readers to describe their best and worst gigs, got me thinking about my checkered career. For a person who’s on the verge of retirement, I haven’t held all that many jobs, especially if you don’t count the twenty years as a generously supported lawyer’s wife, mother, and society matron—less than a dozen, some of which were part-time.

Which were the best jobs and which the worst? And did my hypereducation do anything to help land the best ones? What, if anything, would I do differently, given a chance to start over?

At GRS, I left a comment opining that my most hated job was as a secretary for a demented market researcher. The guy was truly paranoid: convinced he had Enemies (no joke!) who spent every evening sifting through the trash behind the office building, looking for corporate intelligence with which to do his business in. He insisted that every, single piece of trash be snipped up into confetti—this predated inexpensive shredders—before it went in the trash. The job also predated word processors, and since I was not a great typist I threw out a lot of botched letters and memos; these also had to be snipped up, even if only a few words appeared on the page. My employer was given to insane rages and casual insults, an altogether obnoxious gentleman.

But really, what made that a bad job was the wacko boss, not the job itself. I enjoyed working as a receptionist and probably would have enjoyed secretarial or clerical work in any office environment where the boss was blessed with normal mental health.

The real worst job I’ve ever done is teaching freshman composition. After I finished the Ph.D. and several years of TAing, during which I taught many sections of both regular and advanced composition, I swore I’d go on welfare before I ever did that again. Years later, I landed a full-time lecturership, which paid as much as an associate professorship, teaching writing and editing to university juniors and seniors. For a long time, this was a fine job. Then after I’d been there about eight years, the university decided to turn that satellite campus into a four-year institution. Everyone was expected to teach freshman comp, whether they had degrees in English or not.

Ugh. I was right the first time around. If I’d wanted to teach high-school kids, I would have gotten a teaching certificate. At least if you teach high school, you can live wherever you choose, not wherever you can get work. In fact, in my desperation I looked into taking a postgraduate teaching certificate: to get it, I would have been required to take the very upper-division courses I was teaching (!), and I would have started at $24,000, a $19,000 cut in pay!

My favorite jobs—because they were the most fun—were editorial positions at Phoenix and Arizona Highways magazines. Journalists don’t earn much, but they have a good time going hungry. I enjoyed every moment, even the overnighters (which came once a month at Phoenix Magazine), loved writing features, loved editing copy, loved working with artists and photographers, and liked all my bosses and colleagues.

And no doubt the best job I’ve had is the one I hold right now, directing a university’s editorial office, where our staff of five does preproduction work for scholarly journals. The workload is almost nil, because I can delegate most of it to my associate editor and three graduate assistants. Pay is not great, but it’s more than I’ve ever made before. And I don’t waste too much of my time sitting around the office.

So…what effect did hypereducation—I have a B.A. in French and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English—have on this mottled career?

The hateful secretarial job required no higher education at all—the previous incumbent had been my cousin, who didn’t yet have an A.A. (she later became a registered nurse). Neither did the nice little receptionist’s job; however, the B.A. did get me the highest starting salary any receptionist had every earned at that firm, a munificent $300 a month.

The teaching assistantships were associated with graduate school: you TAed because you were in the program. The editorial jobs required a B.A. in journalism or English. Again, at Arizona Highways I was paid a premium for the advanced degrees, and in fact I landed the job because the editor was looking for someone with above-average competence.

I fell into the lecturership because I was assuredly the only English Ph.D. in the state with 15 years of real-world writing and editorial experience. At the same time I was hired, the department hired as my opposite number a man with a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford: presumably an M.A. from Stanford = a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, which oughta tell you something. I earned more than he did, though: approximately six dollars a year more.

The doctorate was not de rigueur for the job I’ve got now, but it certainly thrilled the hiring committee. It also got me a starting salary about $30,000 higher than the university had planned to pay the successful applicant.

So yes, the higher ed helped with the jobs I did get. If I’d started in journalism when I finished the B.A., though, by now I’d probably own Phoenix Magazine and be retired on its proceeds.

If I had it to do over, what would I do differently?

Well, if I knew when I was 22 what I know now, I would still get advanced degrees, but you can be sure they wouldn’t be in the humanities. I probably would combine an M.B.A. and an LL.D. in an attempt to develop a heavy-hitting corporate career. Or I would get a Ph.D. in business management, which opens the door to far better-paying academic jobs than you can get with the same degree in the humanities.

There’s no question that higher education, even in the liberal arts, sets you up for better-paying jobs. And there’s also no question that certain degrees, even some that won’t kill you with difficult coursework, will do better for you than others.

So…what are your best and worst jobs? And what would you do differently if you could start from scratch?

Good ole boys

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Yesterday The New York Times ran a front-page feature highlighting one of Our Beloved City’s most intractable foibles: raw sexism. The Phoenix Country Club, we are told, persists in its immemorial custom of barring women from the part of the institution where business is conducted.

A Little History

The Phoenix Country Club was for many years the only golf course in the city and the only exclusive club for the elite. The city was run by this elite, which for some time called itself the Phoenix Forty. Any business that got done was done by or through the Phoenix Forty. Over time, of course, the Forty expanded; it established Valley Forward, an ancillary group designed to mentor and bring up a new generation of city fathers, and COMPAS, an arts group founded to irrigate a very arid cultural desert. Anyone who was anyone-that is, anyone who wanted to make money in business or the professions-had to do business with these men.

And a Little Today

Such business generally took place in an informal setting, often on the golf course and often at a small watering hole inside the Phoenix Country Club called the Men’s Grill. If you had the right connections and the right anatomical equipment, you, too, could do business in one the most wildly booming cities in the nation. But only if you had the key to the executive washroom.

These facts still hold true, even though the city now has more than one stupidly expensive private club and more golf courses per capita than anyplace in the world. The real business of this city takes place at the Phoenix Country Club. And no girls are allowed.

That’s right. Women are not permitted to set a dainty little foot inside the Men’s Grill, despite years of campaigning to make ambition an equal-opportunity enterprise.

Why Does It Matter

Understand: business does not take place in the PCC’s dining room, a white-linen-tablecloth establishment that, last time I was there, remained as untouched by the concept of “cuisine” as the rest of the place was by the concept of equitable treatment. Food was plain and dreary, service was just OK, and the place still isn’t open for afternoon drinks. There was a dank little hole in the basement where girls could gather, and I have been there to meet with budding groups of would-be female movers and shakers. But no one in power ever stuck his nose in that room, and so little ever came of those groups. That is because the adage about selecting a mentor is true: you don’t want a mentor who is like you; you want a mentor who is in power. For this reason, business and professional women in my generation sought out established men as mentors, not other striving women.

Historically, women have not been the only target of discrimination at the Phoenix Country Club. To this day, it’s a rare dusky face you’ll see in those precincts. And when I was young, Jews were strictly verboten. In the mid-1960s-that’s how late this was happening-a friend whose parents had a membership used to invite our Jewish pal to spend days at the pool, as much as a gesture of rebellion as of friendship. Not until years later were the strictures against Jews and blacks lifted.

Those against women, however, have never been removed. If I wished to associate with the Phoenix Country Club set-and were I in business or politics I would have to-I could pay many thousands of dollars a year to buy and maintain a membership, but I would not be permitted to enter the locus of power. When men walked on the moon for the first time, women members were not allowed into this site or into a similar den at the Arizona Club to watch the historic event on the clubs’ television sets.

When people have objected to these policies, the elite members have shown themselves to be exactly the kind of pigs one would expect. Proving that boys will always be boys, they went after one member who challenged their habits, Logan Van Sittert, and “hooted and hollered at him and called his wife a whore.” Women who have protested the blatant discrimination have seen their names and telephone numbers listed on a Web site titled “Femi Nazis here in Phoenix.” One recalcitrant member, who owns one of the stunningly expensive historic homes on the golf course, looked up to find club members “hopping off their carts” to pee on her pecan tree.

Why, one asks, would anyone want to have anything to do with such morons? Because these morons run the city and to a large extent they run the state. You obtain Power (and the money that comes with it) by rubbing shoulders with Power: part of building a heavy-hitting career in this state is seeing and being seen by the people who are already in power.

And Why We Should Never Forget…

This “custom” is a vestige of a time when women, blacks, Latinos, and Jews were barred from full citizenship in our country. Today we tend to forget the fact that equal access to business, the professions, and the seats of power is a very recent phenomenon. And it is something that should not be forgotten.

Young women in particular need to bear in mind just how new and how precarious their rights as full, adult human beings really are. Let us remember that the the movers and shakers behind the political party currently in power desire, with all their hearts and allegedly religious souls, to limit all women’s right to decide what to do with their bodies-part and parcel of the control that until recently barred women from unfettered participation in business, the professions, and politics.

To insist that all Americans have full access to America’s opportunities and be free to enjoy them to the extent of their abilities is not “feminazism.” It’s common decency.