Dear Search Committee

Comment of the Week

2006-09-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

As the depressing scroll of new jobs is unfurled -- persuading me with each passing day that I am not long for this profession -- comments like these (in reply to this classic DSC post) go a long way toward easing my pain:

The nightmare of solo meals at Crapplebee's and the Compost Garden keeps me awake at night. But the other side of the story, of course, is the meal with Potential Colleagues you actually must endure. I interviewed once at the University of The Most Important City in Canada, where my dinner companion was the chair of the department. A most charming fascist he was, and between pretending to like him and the cheap whiskey he kept ordering me, and trying to figure out ways not to agree with the proposition that lesbian feminists were taking over the universe, it was a miracle I didn't commit self-murder that night. Good thing Canada has strict gun control laws.

"Self-murder." My heart is a-flutter. Someone buy this fellow/madam a serving of the most expensive whiskey in the house!

Please, sir -- can I have some more?

2006-09-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

What I said last week (paraphrased and condensed for readability) when asking my Dean for a raise:

You might remember from last spring that I had planned to stand for early tenure. I’ve decided, however, to wait for several reasons, the most important of which is that I believe I am not being compensated adequately for the work that I have done at this university. I have taught three distinct classes each semester for four years, usually with one or more new preps per term; I have published more than most faculty who have already earned tenure; I am evidently incapable of turning down service requests, and I have spoken to more community audiences and done more to represent this university than any other faculty member I can think of. Having looked at similar jobs at similar schools, I have determined that I could possibly earn a more satisfactory salary elsewhere. For these reasons, I have decided to go on the market this year. I would be interested in staying at [University of X], but I am unwilling to do so at my current salary.

What I was thinking last week (unexpurgated and carefully reconstructed from memory) when asking my Dean for a raise:

You feeble-minded turd gobbler.

First of all, it blows my mind to learn that you make $110,000 a year. As near as I can tell, your job pretty much consists of issuing contradictory and arbitrary policy decisions, the bulk of which contribute to the endless ass-fucking that constitutes our lives as faculty. Having served that function admirably, you and your cheesy porn star mustache leave town for three months a year to study [unnamed animal species] on [unnamed remote continent] -- a research program, by the way, that pretty much renders you the laughing stock of this campus. Consequently, I can’t fathom the perversity of a universe that requires me to come to you on bended knee to ask for a motherfucking raise that would (if granted) still earn me far less than half your fucking salary.

To make the situation even more humiliating, you just hired a term faculty in [under-enrolled social science discipline] who hasn’t even finished his/her fucking Ph.D. and who is now -- after precisely zero years teaching at this fucking clown college -- earning three thousand dollars more than I do. In fact, I won’t earn his/her salary until AFTER I earn tenure in two years -- a process, by the way, that I have no intention of completing without some sort of massive fucking change in the status quo around here. And don’t give me any of the usual bullshit about not offering retention raises to faculty without a competing offer, because as everyone knows, you offered [unnamed natural science professor] a 10% raise for no discernible reason last spring, a gesture that he/she certainly appreciated when purchasing his new fucking boat this summer. Meantime, Spouse and I can only afford three days of fucking child care each week, a deficit that requires Yours Truly to spend two academically unproductive (though personally exhilarating) days watching the Tax Deduction shove random objects in his/her mouth.

You wonder why your junior faculty in the humanities and social sciences don’t stick around for tenure? Because this job makes us want to torture small animals and drink ourselves into death in our garages. Sadly, though, when I break into your office and take a shit on the letter of resignation I leave on your desk, there will be 200 desperate motherfuckers clamoring at your door the next week, willing to accept a position for $5000 less than what you’re paying me right now. Fuck you, you taint-tasting fuck.

Unsurprisingly, the Dean was non-committal on the question of raising my salary.

Job Search, Day One

2006-09-15T09:21:00.000-07:00

As I was perusing the job ads this morning, I came across this little bit of prankery. I can't believe this has remained on the Chronicle site for so long, but I've preserved it for prosperity just in case:

When I first saw the ad, I honestly thought, "Afghanistan? Shit, I could work in Afghanistan." After all, the Preznit tells me we've liberated these people, that freedom is on the march and whatnot. Who cares that the Taliban is back in control of much of the country, that opium production has surged to the levels last achieved during the Russian-Afghan War, or that Karzai's government will survive only so long as it continues to kiss the ring of its American sponsor. Oh, and we've pretty much forgotten about the entire country while more or less giving up on finding that douchebag -- I forget his name, Saddam or Osama, something that sounds freedom-hating. You know, the guy with the facial hair.

Fuck it! Freedom is on the march, baby! And I need a new job!

Then I read this:

Founded in 1819, Maryville College is one of the oldest baccalaureate-granting institutions of higher learning in the South. Consistently ranked in the top tier of Southern colleges in national magazines in recent years, the College is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, USA and appears on the John Templeton Foundation's guide to "Colleges that Encourage Character Development." The curriculum is notable for its strong liberal arts core program and the two semesters of Senior Study research required of all students. The student body, numbering 1150, is drawn from the Southeast, Middle Atlantic States and the Midwest. Located in Maryville, Tennessee, Maryville College is ideally situated between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Knoxville, the state's third largest city.

Sounds lovely . . . but it ain't Jalalabad.

2006-09-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

You know your life has taken a turn for the worse when you and some friends are compelled to send the following e-mail:

Last night a volley of messages were sent out from
this account by a small group of fools who now regret
what they've done. Old friends visiting after two
years apart engaged in a drunken conversation about
people we used to date but lost touch with, or people
we wished we had dated, or people we wished we hadn't
fucked, or people we regret never having fucked, etc.

With laptops and booze in hand, we turned to Google;
after about two hours of investigative work and many
more beers, the ill-advised decision was made to
unleash a wave of shitfaced e-mails from a dummy Yahoo
account. Some of the e-mails were less insulting than
others; some were just mean-spirited and cruel; and
others were filled with half-truths and complete
fables that for some reason seemed funny at the time.
(For example, Maressa, your husband did not give one
of us HPV in 1993; Charles, your wife never had oral
sex with any of us; Ginny and Kevin K., your "pathetic
little secret" has not been posted on Craig's List;
Jon, one of us did not recently sell a used pregnancy
test on eBay).

We're ashamed of all of these e-mails and apologize --
as sincerely as four now-sober adults can apologize --
if any of them actually nudged past your spam blockers.

Each of you deserved to be left alone. Reading the e-mails
today, we are completely mortified, embarrassed,
ashamed, and terribly, terribly sorry.

sincerely,
H, B, D & S

It really did seem funny at the time. Now, not so much. As for my role, I assign 47% of the blame to my faculty senate meeting (see below), which drove me to drink much earlier in the day than I should have...

Kill Me

2006-09-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

Spouse and I had a kid at the end of last semester, which gives this year's job search an extra dimension of urgency. I'm not as angry as I was last spring, but the truth is that we simply have to get the fuck out of our shithole town before our child reaches high school; though I understand this appears to give us a fourteen year cushion, I plan to throw myself in front of a bus if we're not out of here by summer 2008. The clock is ticking.

Last year's search was moderately selective. I applied to fifteen jobs -- which is quite a few, I think, for a faculty member in his/her fourth year -- mostly in regions of the country that were closer to our families, mostly at schools like my own that emphasize teaching but expect some sort of commitment to publishing, and mostly in areas of the US that are less goddamned expensive than the place I live now. Our regional criteria excluded the West Coast, the Sun Belt, the Deep South, and upper New England, with some wiggle room in the Mid-Atlantic states. My professional criteria excluded Research I institutions, most of whom would look at my school's letterhead and think, "There's a school called this? Who the fuck are these people?" That, and they'd look at my CV and conclude that I have no coherent research field, even though I've published a good handful of articles in high quality, peer-reviewed journals and have churned out more book reviews than most people produce in a lifetime. I'm a huge believer in the value of recognizing one's limits, whether those limits are artificial or self-imposed, the consequence of a life devoted (as mine has been) to underachievement.

As evidence of this, consider what I'm doing as I type this post. Instead of bettering myself in some small way, I'm calling in to my university's faculty senate meeting from home. I'm watching the Tax Deduction today, and I have a speaker phone apparatus that allows me to play old Atari games on Spouse's computer while I suffer through this bovine gathering, whose only virtue is that -- like a surge of menstrual cramping -- it only happens once a month. The only thing keeping me sane at the moment is the fact that I can watch the Red Sox on my laptop while my knuckleheaded colleagues ponder the latest quack proposal descending from the Provost's office....

The Tax Deduction is so fucking bored by the meeting that she's been asleep in her swing since the approval of the last meeting's minutes. Lucky baby. If she'd only wake up and start screaming, perhaps I could artfully duck out of this meeting. Nah. Sleep well, my child. Let the buffoonery wash over you like a gentle, somnolent wave.

I wonder if I'd get fired if I got tanked while I listened to Faculty Senate? I don't think anyone even remembers I'm here, so why not? I'll take a shot every time Dr. X makes a niggling procedural observation; every time one of the departments with which I'm not affiliated introduces a stupid certificate or degree program that I don't give a shit about, and every time a yawn of awkward silence follows the senate chair's request for discussion of an agenda item that clearly no one has cared enough to think about.... I'll be on the floor in about 15 minutes.

Mr. Beefeater? Meet Mr. Tonic. Oh, I see you've met before.

Here we go again . . .

2006-08-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

First day of classes . . . rewarding myself with a liter and a half of wine as I scan the job postings.

It begins. Christ help us.

No, really. Some of my best friends are secretaries. Honest.

2006-03-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

This, from "JW," is too good to be left buried in the comments:

Dear BA,

Dear, dear, poor, sweet, stupid BA. I know how hard it is to work all those years, struggle financially, spend hours on research, only to find out after all that work, that you appeal to no one. Your life is meaningless. Your work is unimportant. Your personality is repulsive. And your attitude is, well you said it, bad.

As you know, there is more than one side to a story. Hows about I clue you in on the other side, bud? Guess what I do for a below-poverty-level living? I am the secretary for faculty searches. I get it from BOTH sides: the intellectual elitist who thinks NOBODY ever before fucking thought the thoughts he's had, AND the brilliant, already-tenured and frequently unshowered professor.

Let me explain. First of all, I don't care how far you have to drive to the airport and that your wife is 11 months pregnant and needs the car to take your yet-un-potty trained 7-year old for his twice-weekly shrink visit. And I don't care that you have allergies so could I be sure, SURE, ABSOLUTELY SURE that you get a non-smoking room. And furthermore, I couldn't give a shit less about your special needs meaning you have to stand in mountain pose, facing north at 2:17 p.m. and chant so would I please not schedule any appointments then. And if I may ask, why, if wifey isn't coming with you, do I need to arrange to have a breast pump available?

OF COURSE I'll drive you around so that you can see the "housing options," in our fine town. While we're at it, how 'bout I stop by Home Depot so that you can pick up an application for something that you could actually DO!

Oh yes, we're all putting our best foot forward here. But before you start whining to me about how hard it is to get a job, spend a little time in the real world with me, why doncha? In MY real world, there's no such thing as tenure. In MY world, spring break does not exist. In MY world, nobody's claiming we're in the pick-your-own-number percentile of salaries.

Why do I do it? Because you people are the most interesting thing on the face of the earth. I don't have to go to work each day. I GET to go to work each day and hang out with you guys. It is amazing.

So, quit whining. Shave. Look a little bright-eyed. And remember, at small, liberal arts colleges they ask for everyone's input in selecting faculty.

Including ME!

That's the kind of bile we need around here. In a mirror universe, there would be a blog entitled "Dear Job Candidate," in which college and university staff disgorge streams of poison darts at the prima donnas who descend from the clouds for a few days each spring and clot their lives with paperwork and asinine requests like the (I assume) loosely non-fictional ones detailed above. Indeed, on my own campus, an otherwise qualified interviewee was recently tossed out of the pool due in part to her rude treatment of our department staff when faculty were not present. While we're slogging through piles of applications, meeting with candidates at conferences, and discussing matters of Deep Scholarly Import with the few who make it through to the final stage, underpaid -- and in my state, non-unionized -- colleagues like JW are responsible for arranging everything and dealing with the yawning ocean of bullshit that invariably washes over even the simplest administrative task. In a truly just world, JW would be permitted to garrotte and de-bone any candidate who requested appointment-free yoga time.

So allow me to issue a disclaimer: At no point in the interview process described on this blog was I treated with anything but saintly consideration by anyone outside the closed circle of dysfunctional, mouth-breathing faculty who elected (wisely) not to make me their colleague.

Going Public

2006-03-10T00:15:00.000-08:00

For those on the academic job market, March -- not April, with all due respect to T. S. Eliot -- is the cruelest month. By now, most of us have completed our interviews and have discovered our fate. Some of our friends and colleagues have received job offers, for which they are momentarily grateful; the rest of us are facing another year of adjunct appointments, another year of living in shitty towns we can't wait to leave, another year of wondering when enough is enough. While setting aside the proper amount of time to flog ourselves for our personal inadequacies and shake our fists mightily at an oversaturated market, we must eventually settle our gaze upon the true source of our enduring misery -- the search committees who cast our files into the "B" and "C" piles, who dismissed our artfully-crafted letters and fruited CV's, who overlooked our stunning proclamations during preliminary phone and conference interviews, and who ultimately chose to deprive us of the employment we so evidently deserved.

They are the enemy, and they must be exposed.

To that end, I have set up two e-mail accounts, one for me and one for you. If you or someone you know has some choice sentiments you'd like to pass along to the search committees who rejected you, you can contact me directly (see the address at the top of the page) using the dummy e-mail account I have created to assure maximum anonymity and guarantee that everyone feels comfortable releasing their inner, gurgling volcano of bile. I will post all anecdotes, foul oaths, and cries for justice from an uncaring universe on this blog. I'll continue to post, too, as my career spirals in ever tighter circles toward the sewer.

The dummy address is eat.me2006(at)yahoo.com, with the password "fuckoff" (all lowercase). It's my little gift to you. Please don't use it to threaten or harrass anyone, unless you're threatening me.

Of course, anyone who wishes simply to e-mail me from another address is welcome to do so. All names, locations, schools, and other identifying details will be altered to assure true anonymity. Go ahead. Get it out there. You'll feel better.

(And if you're a newcomer to this blog, I encourage you to review my earlier posts to get a sense of the spirit in which we're going to be spraying the shit around here.)

Dial "D" for "Douchebag"

2006-03-07T20:40:00.000-08:00

Good news, world! I didn't get a (new) job this year! The fucknuts at QLAC decided to take a pass on me, and they had the high fucking class to dispense the news in a brief letter (and the phrase "I shit you not" comes to mind here) signed with the laser-printed signature of the department chair. Are you fucking kidding me? Actually, to call it a "signature" would be to grant the gesture an unearned degree of professional courtesy. This was not like a mass mailing from George W. Bush to his supporters -- e.g., "Laura and I thank you for your generous financial support and the stellar rim jobs we received during our last visit to [insert fascist gated community name here]. Best wishes, [insert facsimile of president's signature here]." No, none of that. This was actually the search committee chair's name printed in a different fucking font. (I think it was Lucida Handwriting.) They couldn't even pretend to give a fuck. To top it all off, the letter was evidently the same letter they mailed out to the first round of rejects -- it thanked me for taking the time to apply but expressed regret that my candidacy could not be "passed along to the next stage" and that I would not be invited for a campus interview.

Congratulations, QLAC! You are the inaugural recipients of the Outstanding Achievement in Douchedom Award, to be awarded each year to the college or university department that single-handedly undermines all the pious rhetoric about making academic searches "friendlier" and more “humane.” If I ever run into you feeble-minded fucks at a conference, I’ll try to remember to say hello before I blind you all with a handful of shrimp skewers.

Honorable mention to Large Southern State University, which has evidently decided to save money on letterhead this year by e-mailing its job search rejects en masse with the anticlimactic news that we "were not among those invited for preliminary conference interviews in January." Thanks for the tip, ass clown. I was wondering what to do with myself those first few days of the year. Ending the e-mail on a more positive note, however, the human resources director -- I suppose the search committee chair simply can’t be bothered to participate in the correspondence -- encouraged us to consider applying for "other open positions" at the university.

What a fabulous fucking idea! Here I was, thinking that the world had closed in around me, that the three years I devoted to stuffing my CV with attractive, interesting classes, peer-reviewed publications and an impressive roster of service commitments had all come to naught -- that somehow I had become less marketable since I first bartered my way into the academy in 2002. But no. As LSSU has helpfully reminded me, the bong is actually half-full! I'm not an economist, for instance, but I see here that a position in econometrics is still listed as open. And it seems the grounds crew is always looking for someone to mow the lawn and snip the rose bushes. There are, in fact, a lot of fantastic jobs at this university that somehow -- in my withered, constricted view of my own skills -- I managed not to explore.

The future sure does look bright. It will probably look even brighter after I drink the bottle of scotch calling me from across the living room....

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

2006-02-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-02-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

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.