Reasons I will turn you down, even if you offer me the job: Part III

Lesson #3: Clean up your office, you filthy fucking pig.

Quaint Liberal Arts College is a unique place filled with unique people, very few of whom I would want as distant neighbors, much less as lifelong colleagues. After three-plus years in the academy, I'd like to think I've developed a body of standards -- demanding though fair — for judging the intellectual, moral, ethical and hygienic fitness of my peers. Before my interview at QLAC last month, I would not have included "hygiene" on that list. Now, though, I offer this little piece of warm advice to job-seekers near and far: when you visit a campus, take a little whiff. Is that the smell of intellectual integrity, of scholastic good cheer, of knowledge bursting through the womb and into the world? Or is that the odor of rotting cheese, stale crackers and mouldy coffee mugs, clotting the nooks of your future colleagues' offices?

Now, it should be noted that I currently draw a paycheck from a tiny institution in a state that is, shall we say, just a little unkempt compared with the rest of the nation. When I flew out to my interview a few years back, I recall sitting in the airport and realizing that everyone traveling to this state seemed just a wee bit uglier than everyone else in the airport -- there were the usual hair-related problems (mostly variations in the key of "mullet") as well as eyes that were too deeply-set, or chins that flowed effortlessly and indistinguishably into the flesh of the neck, or the general look of a life filled with one catastrophic humiliation after another. And my university has drawn its share of eccentrics and misfits, too. We have faculty -- particularly those who teach in the dank, sweaty field of "outdoor studies" -- who may forego the occasional shower, and until about three years ago we had two faculty in the humanities and social sciences who lived on 24-foot boats in the harbor near campus, where they chose to spend their nights floating in a pool of brackish water, leaked diesel fuel, and decomposing fish carcasses. Until he retired at the age of 38, one of these professors was an "urchin hippie" -- as opposed to the lawyer-hippies in this town who live in five-bedroom houses -- who smoked an impossible amount of marijuana and took his dog everywhere with him. Nice guy; nice dog; both could have used a toothbrush.

None of this, however, compares with Professor Z. In this particular department at QLAC, the professors' offices are large enough that they actually hold all their classes there in small seminars of 10-15 students. It was a bit high-schoolish for yours truly, but all things considered, these were nice fucking offices with windows and abundant natural sunlight -- a far cry from the tiny, windowless, red-carpeted bread box to which I've been confined for several years. Most of the faculty kept their shit tidy, but Professor Z -- the chair of the department and chair of the search committee -- had evidently surrendered to his inner hog and refused to clean up anything. In the town where I currently live, we have a number of "garbage houses," indoor landfills inhabited by solitary crazy people who allow their homes to become overrun with old newspapers, bags of garbage, and worthless refuse acquired from yard sales. In one of these houses, the rubbish is piled so high that a casual passer-by can view the heaps through the front window, creeping ever-upward to glory.

Professor Z's office was just such a place. Mounds of paper, years in the making, were scattered across the floor; half-eaten sleeves of Ritz crackers lay on the seminar table, stuffed between piles of books and computer equipment; I counted at least eight coffee mugs, filled with varying proportions of stale coffee and mould, lingering and forgotten around the room. I half expected to see little jars of urine and feces, stacked like a winter's supply of grandma’s pickled beets and stewed tomatoes. I wondered where he kept his pet raccoons.

To his minimal credit, Professor Z mumbled an apology at some point during my slack-jawed, 15-minute visit. "You'll have to forgive my office," he said. "I have ADHD."

This, I thought, was the least of his worries.

Reasons I will turn you down, even if you offer me the job: Part II

Lesson #2: Olive Garden, Baker's Square, and Red Lobster are not good restaurants.

Many departments -- as I suggested in my last post -- go out of their way to show their candidates a pleasant time during their campus visits. Because interviewees are interested not merely in scoring a job but are also keen to see how faculty get on with one another, hospitality and good cheer are among the intangible factors that might tip a candidate's choice in favor of one school over another. There's a delicate balance to this, of course. Too much sociability can send out the wrong signals. For instance, a friend of mine once visited a medium-sized state school deep in the heart of Dixie, in a town made temporarily notorious for a schoolyard sniper incident some years ago; after a night of heavy drinking with several (potential) colleagues, my friend realized that his companions were drooling, face-down on the bar floor not because they were happy with their station in life, but because they did not have the courage to hang themselves in the garage and be done with it. He ultimately turned down the job offer, but at least he got shitfaced on someone else's nickel.

If only I had been so lucky. I recently interviewed with Quaint Liberal Arts College, located in a hastily-constructed exurb of a major materopolitan area, a tech town dominated by strip malls and corporate office parks, few of which were filled to capacity. After the interview itself -- about which I will have more thunderous complaints in future posts -- I was driven back to my hotel (by someone, thank Christ, other than Professor Ashtray [see post below]) and abandoned to my own devices by 4:00 p.m. As near as I could tell, that was the last I could expect to see of anyone remotely affiliated with the school; no dinner plans had been suggested, and I was too puzzled to ask my escort what the fuck was going on. I had never heard of a school that seemingly forgot to schedule dinner with a candidate, so I could only assume this was a conscious decision.

Having been lodged in an interstate off-ramp hotel, my dinner options were largely determined by the immiserating logic of 1990's bonanza capitalism, which decorated every office park with a pinwheel of shitty restaurants like Applebee’s and Olive Garden. These places are the culinary equivalents to Home Depot and Circuit City, the very restaurants I would visit if I had a box of shotgun shells and nothing left to lose. Aside from Carl's Jr. -- last seen pimping what I can only suspect was an inedible and dangerous "Six Dollar Mushroom and Portobello Burger" -- my options included Olive Garden, Baker's Square, and Red Lobster. Truth be told, I was quite drawn to the notion of eating an entire banana cream pie at Baker's Square; I also considered how wonderful it might be to eat a mound of sulfite-drenched shrimp and wait until my throat swelled, choking off my windpipe and bringing my job search to its inevitable conclusion. But few things in this world scream "I am a fat, fucking loser" quite like a solitary meal at Olive Garden, with its never-ending pasta bowl and unlimited conveyer belt of salad and breadsticks. So there I ate, gobbling pasta alfredo and reading the latest issue of Harper's, which contained an utterly inane article by Stanley Fish about "intelligent design" and the "intellectual left."

The experience was almost as depressing as I wanted it to be. On the way back to my hotel, I dropped into a nearby convenience store and bought a 40-oz. Miller Genuine Draft, which I consumed in a brown paper bag.

Reasons I will turn you down, even if you offer me the job: Part I

OK, you melon-headed turtle fuckers. The waterboarding begins anew, whether Donald Rumsfeld approves or not.

Now, I’ve been on a number of search committees over the past several years, and along the way I’ve learned a few precious nuggets of wisdom – the sort of pithy aphorisms you might find crumpled inside a fortune cookie or prominently highlighted during a Catholic homily. If you were attending a self-help seminar, this is the sort of shit you would write down and mutter to yourself each morning as you try to overcome your devastating alcoholism, your repressed memories of childhood trauma, your crushing fear of open spaces. But evidently, you fucks at Quaint Little Liberal Arts College have yet to absorb these powerful, life-affirming messages, which likely explains why your faculty appear to be comprised entirely of the under-socialized pleckos whom I recall feeding along the rocks lining the bottom of graduate programs throughout the land. I always wondered where those people got jobs; now I know. So I will not be joining your Land of Misfit Faculty no matter how this search concludes, and over the next few days I will do my best to indicate why.

Let's start with the basics. When my department brings candidates to campus, they might as well be showing up for the academic equivalent of a free trip to a fucking day spa. Maybe the candidate won the trip in a PTA raffle; maybe they earned it for test-driving a hybrid car – who fucking cares? The point is, from the second they arrive in our shitty little village, our candidates are escorted by their future colleagues, who slather them in mud, scrub them with herbed salt, wrap them in seaweed, and maybe even finish them off with a hand job or a little taint-licking at the end of the day. Maybe we’re special that way, maybe not. The point is, we don’t commit the following breaches of etiquette:

Lesson #1: We don’t send our token chain-smoker to pick up the candidate at her/his hotel the morning of the interview. Now, I’m no Puritan on the subject of tobacco. I like to hit the local pub and get fucking creamed every now and again like everyone else -- and when I do, I’ve been known to suck down, say, the stray three dozen cigarettes in a single night. But what the fuck were you people thinking when you sent Dr. Adenocarcinoma to retrieve me in his rolling ashtray so we could take a morning drive around town and campus? I’ve never seen anyone – that is, anyone who wasn’t grinding out a long weekend on crystal meth -- blow through a pack of Camels as feverishly as this fellow did in our two precious hours together. And I can’t recall the last time someone had to run a Dirt Devil over the front seat to siphon away a mound of burnt, gnarled filters. (And who carries a Dirt Devil in his car to begin with? Why not just save the trouble and throw your fucking cigarettes in a fucking garbage can?) It was a courteous gesture, but he seemingly didn’t notice the pile of ash and butts that had accumulated, nearly ankle-deep, on the floor of the car. I could hardly pay attention to the tour, as I was straining my legs to keep them a centimeter or two above the cigarette graveyard at my feet. At one point, we passed by a Jiffy Lube; when I jokingly suggested that they might have a real vacuum cleaner we could use, Professor Chest Mucous wheezed out a laugh and continued hot-boxing like a man who had recently been turned town for tenure.

Allow me to be the first to tell you all what a load of twats you are.

Here's the thing of it. I already have a fucking job, for which I am eternally fucking grateful to a gracious Lord I don't actually believe in. So let's get that little bit of concern right the fuck out of the way. I want a new job because my current school pays me in green stamps and video game tokens that I can only use at Chuck E. Fucking Cheese, but I'm otherwise happy as a goddamned clam. In other words, I'm not the desperate asshole I was in graduate school, ready to throw my skirt up over my head and sprawl over the fucking cider barrel for a posse of three-fingered, hayseed dipshits like yourselves. I'm not your bitch, so quit treating me like your bitch. I will fucking hop back on that plane, eat a few sacks of free peanuts, take a little nap, fidget nervously as the plane lands, breathe a little sigh of relief, grumble at the children blocking my egress from the cabin, wait patiently for my baggage, rent a car at the airport, drive to your quaint little campus, and filet you like the gasping, flopping trouts you are.

***

I realized your department was slightly daft during the phone interview in December. Remember that? Yeah, that was a fucking hoot, wasn't it? Remember when you asked me about the "most creative thing [I've] ever done in the classroom?" What the fuck was that? Remember what I said?

"Powerpoint."

That's right, the only thing I could cite as evidence of my vast, creative potential was that I had somehow learned over the past several years to use fucking Powerpoint in my lectures.

Click. "Here's a photo of Stalin at Yalta. What a tosser he was." Click. "Here's a painting by Monet. Fucking lovely, right?" Click. "Here's a male penguin guarding a penguin egg. There's family values for you."

Yeah, that's real fucking inspiring.

But to be fair, what the fuck kind of query is that? Who writes your interview questions? What was I supposed to say? That I knock about on the tops of desks like Robin Williams in that bathetic movie about horny teenage boys and bad poetry? That I once illuminated the nuances of the Bush Doctrine by taking a massive shit on the floor and flinging it around the room like a deranged monkey?

Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick.

I have to go now. But I'm not finished with you fucks just yet. So you sit there and try to think of all the stupid things you did when I came to your campus last week.

Then I'm going to come back and yell at you a little bit more, until you soil yourselves and promise not to behave this way ever again.