Welcome to the Clown Car

The Dark - Ben Kyle (w/Ryan Adams) (mp3)
You Get What You Give - New Radicals (mp3)

You want new ideas? Be ready to create a new job title. You can’t make new things happen without new employees or big promotions. That’s my takeaway from this summer.

Our entire floor of administrators spent the summer visiting select schools to conversate and collect ways to build on and improve what we do. At the same time, committees of faculty and staff members met and set out action plans for the accreditation process our school must undergo this fall, a process that expects schools to evolve and adapt over time.

I’m a hopey changey kind of guy, and this kind of stuff excites the hell out of me.

All those trips, and all those committees, and all those fresh new ideas, and they all had one uniting common bond: A New Position. And I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout sex.

You want something more done? You want to ramp something up or revamp it? Create a new job description. Or appoint someone with a new title with mo’ money. Otherwise, it will never happen. That’s the universal innuendo of every task force and committee I’ve seen recently.

We’re all busy. Even those of us who aren’t that busy, whose days don’t stretch past 40 hours and whose 40-hour weeks aren’t the stuff of ulcerating stress and misery, whose days are regularly buffered with stops on Facebook or casual emails or a few clips of last night’s “Daily Show,” even those people are firmly convinced they’re busy. They could pass a lie detector test on it, because they truly believe it. Myself included.

When someone has an idea, and that idea points to more responsibility on our plate, our instantaneous reaction is, “Sorry. I’m busy.” We can’t help it. Because we are. Busy. Or we believe we are. At least when it’s our idea, we can sometimes squeeze in time for it... but only when we own the idea. Otherwise, fuhgiddaboutit.

Ironically, as a faculty and staff, we can’t figure out why our salaries aren’t going up. And we can’t figure out how tuition can keep rising, and student numbers can hold steady, yet there’s no income around for us to make mo’ money. (HINT: Maybe it’s because we keep identifying all these things that need to be done and insisting that new people have to be hired to do them. Our raises are going to add people to our ranks!**)

There’s no magic solution here. Few folks want more responsibility without more money or more power. That’s the way we are.

However, for us to implement even half of the ideas we as a school generated this summer, we’d apparently need to hire three to five more full-time people, who would require a budgetary investment of... what, at least $150-200,000, right? After the cost of benefits and other perks, even if the average salary was technically only $35-40,000?

Well, if we have a staff of 150, and we just threw $200k at new employees, not only have we potentially sacrificed $1k+ raises for each of us, but we’ve added three to five more people to the salaried population, which makes the next round of raises spread ever thinner.

Was it always like this?

Did cavemen sit in cavemen conferences and decide someone needed to tackle the velociraptor problem, and the only way to do it was to create a “Velociraptor Czar” job position and post the job on Monster.com?

I don’t think so. I think they took a look at what they were all doing. And if velociraptors deserved more energy, they figured out what deserved less, and they took from that. Cavemen probably had to conclude that some of the jobs they were doing weren’t nearly as important as “Velociraptor Czar.”

We as a society have increasingly lost the ability to give things up.

We’re hoarders. We hold onto things far beyond the point where it’s worth doing or keeping. And this is true with jobs as much as anything. If we as a school were completely honest, there are several positions in our ranks that are outdated concepts from an earlier era. Or jobs that used to take someone 40 hours a week now shouldn’t take more than 20, but that dude or lady ain’t about to admit she’s doing half a job for full-time wage.

And we like the people in those jobs. They probably took that new job description back in 1992 and worked it like gangbusters. And we don’t want to let them go, because we’re a tight-knit family. Kumbaya and shit. I get it.

But we can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t demand more salary for ourselves, demand new people to fill new perceived needs, and also demand that the family all stay together and no one breaks up the band. But hell, even the Beatles eventually had to cut Stu Sutcliffe.

New positions. Raises. Keeping the family in tact. Tuition that has already out-priced the market. Not even in America can all of these things remain comfortably crammed in the clown car. Something's gotta give.

* -- Well, it’s also going to support pension plans for retirees who have vastly outlived their expected expiration date, to health care plans that shoot up faster than Courtney Love, and to the ever-increasing costs of campus and building maintenance. But those aren’t as central to my point.

What I Deserve

Kelly Willis--"What I Deserve" (mp3)
John Hartford--"In Tall Buildings" (mp3)

If you work where I work, then you got your contract at the end of last week.

Yeah, I know they told us no raises and all of that, but we can hope, can't we? Contract time is that time when we throw the rest of world to the wolves and focus only on what we can hope to get. Friends? Yeah, we think, they've done pretty well and they're pretty valuable, but, hey, times are tough and we get into this mindset where, yeah, we know what the general conditions of the economy, the company, whatever, are, blah, blah, blah, but then we conveniently put those aside.

Instead, we think: "Yeah, I know most people are not getting raises, but that doesn't mean that they can't still recognize a valuable employee who has had a really good year, i.e., me."

And the best part is, it doesn't even have to be a "good year" to get us thinking. Of course, a good year is best, because it's hardest for our internal voice to refute. But we can easily find ourselves going with "tough year" (dealt with a lot of personal stuff) or "need to demonstrate that they want to keep me year" (I'm young and the world is my oyster) or even "fucked up early but got back on track year" (yeah, that was a bad decision, but that was way, way, way back in October). Potentially, there is a reward for anything. Potentially.

Hard Lessons of Life 1-101: If you work for something larger than yourself, then, ultimately, yes, you are a cog in a machine and they don't give a shit about you. They may smile, they may pat on the back, they may look you in the eye and tell you in all sincerity how much they value you. They may even believe it. They may be personal friends with you outside of the office. They may be Godfather to your children. They may have cried on your shoulder during a tough time they were having. They may confide in you more than anyone else. I'm here to tell you--none of it means shit. It isn't personal. It's just business.

Once, a long time ago, I was a business major, a management major more specifically, and though I didn't learn much, I did learn all 101 hard lessons of life and I will repeat them for your edification: if you work for something larger than yourself, then whoever you work for does not give a shit about you.

Here's how an introductory Management text would have put it: the first goal of any business, organization, or institution is self-preservation.

Once you work through that in your head, you know I'm not messing with you. If the primary goal is self-preservation, then everything else, and I mean everything (for anyone who is an idealistic liberal like me), is subservient. Yep, even you and your raise and your career and your life ambitions.

You can be sacrificed at the drop of a hat.

That is the truth, and the upside is, I truly believe, that the truth shall set you free. As Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, "Thus endeth the lesson." Now, sign your G-d contract and get back to work.


"What I Deserve" comes from Kelly Willis' first major CD of the same name. Hartford's "In Tall Buildings" comes from his John Hartford Anthology. Sadly, the man (who once played a brilliant solo show in our chapel) passed away many years ago. This song of his bears listening to with tears and recognition several times each year of your working life. Since I'm in the anti-Man mode tonight, I don't care if these songs are available at Itunes or not.