Of Life and Times

I have been out of work for a long time. My last permanent full-time position - the administrative assistant to the Dean of the School of Business - ended in 2005. I spent two years in school, then as I graduated the university where I had been working, they put a freeze on hiring that has been ongoing for more than two years. The university is the main employer around here, and my wife is a professor, so what is a guy to do?

To keep busy I have been volunteering on campus in various capacities. I really enjoy the service, but occasionally there is a surprise job vacancy I can apply for. I jump at these opportunities. They have all been part-time positions, and not something that anyone who would like to support a family would consider, but something is better than nothing.

I have been on the hiring end of the job interviewing process. I have learned over the years that it is not my place to judge how a candidate is choosing to live his life. It is my job to determine if this person is the best qualified for my position. Now I am on the petitioner's side of the process. I am finding that what I learned as the interviewer is evidently not true. At least I have seen no connection to what I have learned to what I am experiencing now.

This week I interviewed for an Academic Advisor position. It is a 3/4 time position that requires a flexible schedule and only occasional full-time work. I haven't heard back from the committee yet. The last couple of interviews I had on campus were roughly equivalent to this one. I go into the room and sit down. We all introduce ourselves to each other, even though we all know each other and have worked together in past capacities for many years. Inwardly I laugh about the formal nature of this dance. It all seems so pompous. Anyway, they ask their questions and I give my answers. The requirements for the positions are well below the requirements of anything I have done before. Knowing that I can't come across as cavalier or demeaning about the position I make sure that I remain amply humble and grateful for the opportunity to interview. I listen politely to everyone make their schpeel about the importance of their position at the university, and watch as they banter amongst themselves, showing me that they have solidarity, something in which I am not allowed to share, being the outsider. After all, it would be inappropriate for me to pretend to be their equal and banter on an equal footing with them. I realize that all these intricate dance steps are subconscious, and I have done it myself before. I guess I just never noticed it for what it is until this week.

Once the lines of demarcation have been drawn, and the power base established, all in the most cordial of manners, the serious questioning begins. This becomes like the Final Judgment, but without the mercy God will be offering us. I have to show them why I am the only clear choice for this position. I spend my time convincing them that I actually can fulfill the obligations and the needs of this position with responsibility and aplomb. I try my darnedest to show them that I am the only clear choice for the position.

Finally, the million dollar question/bomb is dropped. "Mr. Merrill, what are your future plans? Don't you want full-time work?" What a loaded question! What am I supposed to say? Should I lie and tell them that the only aspiration I have ever had in life is to fill this one job vacancy? Am I supposed to tell them that no matter what  else is ever offered to me that my faithfulness to this position could never be swayed? Good grief! So I do the only thing I can think of doing, I tell the truth. Of course I would love a full-time job. Who wouldn't? But I hasten to emphasize that there haven't been full-time positions for years, and I am not guessing that there will be any in the near future. This position is perfect for me. I proceed to give them multiple reasons why this position is the one and only way to complete my life at this point. I promise, I do this without becoming sycophantic about my groveling, but groveling is almost always what it comes down to in the end. To appear to be too confident can come across as threatening to the interviewer because then they sense that they don't own you enough to control you, so they turn to less "troublesome" candidates to fill the vacancy.

If this position is like the last few I have interviewed for, the interviewers will feel like they can see into my future and somehow they know what my future decisions will be. Their job is to decide what decisions I will make in the future, based on the knowledge of me they have discerned during this 10 minute interview. They decide whether I will indeed accept full-time work if it is offered to me at some indefinite time in the future, and based on this foreknowledge they decide that it will be too great a risk to train me just to lose me in six months, so they give the job to someone who has convinced them that they couldn't possibly be happy in full-time employment, and this part-time job is the end all to their life's ambitions.

After experiencing the same scenario time after time after time, I have begun to lose hope in the interviewing process. So what are the usual death blows? "He lives too far away from work. We will probably have trouble with attendance." "He is male, and we would be uncomfortable putting him in with all the ladies in the office." Believe it or not I have been told by a director of HR that this is the very reason I was not hired for a position once. She felt uncomfortable with the thought that she would have to work with a male in the evening for business. That is a comfort, because we certainly would not want our male executives working with a female subordinate after hours at work Smirk. The list of reasons that I shouldn't be the one to fill a position for which I am amply qualified are too numerous to fit here, evidently. So I just do the interview, give it my best shot. I smile, try to be properly humbled by the opportunity, compliment the committee, but without trying to appear servile.

I'm telling you that this whole interviewing thing is soooo hard! It should be so simple. You go in, you have introductions, they tell you what you need to know, they ask you some pertinent questions, you ask yours, then they make their decision. But somehow this dance of the of the Deities always seems to sweep into the room and carry the committee away to a loftier realm where they suddenly feel the need to view you as from one who sits on high, meeting out judgments and pronouncements of the future and its probabilities.

Okay, I admit it, perhaps I am just a tiny bit cynical these days.

I was reminded today, in a conversation with one of my daughters, that sometimes even the best laid plans can be hijacked by life and dumped in the trash. She was saying, "I try so hard to lay low. I don't go visiting anyone. I rarely get any visitors. In fact, I doubt most people I know have any idea where I live. Yet no matter how bland I try to make my life, trouble just seems to hunt me down." Today she saw that she was getting low on gasoline, so after work she pulled into the only gas station between her work and her house, only to find that their pumps weren't working. Actually, there was another station right next door, but they required a credit card, which she doesn't have. The long and the short of it was that after an hour of talking and negotiating, the station attendant called her own mother, who came down and paid for twenty dollars worth of gas with her own credit card. My daughter gave her twenty in cash, got her gas and was able to make it home.

Sometimes it seems as if there is an eager crowd of trouble makers waiting in a class for the torment of humanity. When an opportunity arises to make our lives more difficult, hands go up all over the room, with each new mischief crying, "Pick me! Pick me!"

What pleases me about her story was her way of telling it and concluding with a joke. What a revealing message. We all have troubles, many of which we do our best to avoid, and many of which we don't even see coming. But what do we do when those troubles present themselves? Do we weep and whine about how hard we have it? Do we point fingers and try to lay blame on someone for our trials in life? (Like that would somehow improve the situation by making someone else suffer like we feel we are.) Do we grow sullen and sulk about the house feeling sorry for ourselves? Well, okay, perhaps a little bit of that last one. But what really shows our personal strength and ability to survive hard times is our ability to maintain a sense of humor. If we can see humor in the midst of adversity, then we can temper our sorrows by the joys that surround us all the time. And yes, they do surround us all the time.

When I got divorced, and became a single father with four children in tow, I was pretty lost. My children were traumatized by it all. I was traumatized as much as they were, but we learned to make games out of common things. I focused on what we had and not what we didn't, which was most everything. I personally felt defeated, worthless and lost, a person of almost no worth. But now that I think of it, I spent almost all of my energies helping the children feel safe in the home, and feel good about themselves. I spent a lot of time praising, and even being silly for them, if that is what it took to get them to laugh and think of something other than the loss of their family as they knew it. We used to watch programs on the television, like Little House on the Prairie. I cried every time I watched an episode. I swear the writers had it out for me. But the children loved it. They seemed to know just when the tears were called for in the script, and at that moment they would start glancing at me to see if I was going to cry again. And I always did. They seemed to be somehow settled by that ritual.

In fact, we set up all sorts of rituals around the house. Having routines and phrases they heard all the time seemed to help keep them grounded. We always had meals at expected times. We faithfully watched something as a family on the weekend or in the early evening. They knew that if they wanted to stay up a little longer all they had to do was scratch the back of my head and shoulders and I would conk out almost immediately. These little things gave them a real sense of control that was sorely lacking in their lives. If they started to fight amongst themselves I would remind them that the world was not a very safe place sometimes, so when we come home all the fighting stops. Home was a place to be safe from being told we aren't good enough or we are dumb. There was to be no name calling, only kindness at home.

I admit that it was easier said than done, but of all my little accomplishments in life, I think the trust the children gave me, in time, became one of my most prized possessions. They knew I would stand up for them and protect them. They even began protecting me from things they thought would upset me. I admit that I got upset sometimes when they did that, because usually they wouldn't tell me about something everyone else was doing at school because they were sure we couldn't afford it. Rather than watch me stew over how I was going to pay for it, they just quietly went about their business and didn't tell me about it. I always felt really bad when I found out after the fact that they had missed something because they thought they were protecting me.

This brings me to my last point. When we try to do something that is good, with all the right intentions and all the good wishes we have, it still doesn't always turn out the way we want it to. Our daughter is now raising four children on her own under very difficult circumstances. She has her days of despair and depression. But we are so proud of her because she is working so hard to be an attentive and loving parent. Everything seems to go wrong, but she does everything she can to help her children feel like everything is normal, and they are safe and secure. She is still young, and still learning about what it means to be an adult, and how to be a parent, but she stands head and shoulders above many others we have seen who don't seem to care what happens to the children as long as they are not inconvenienced by anything their children may think they need, like love and security.

To my daughter I say, "Good for you! Show those children that you are better than the problems you have to deal with each day. Keep teaching them that the bonds of your love are stronger than death, that you will always be there to protect them and fight for them and their happiness." Life has so many mishaps. I say we need to learn to look above them and see what is priceless and ennobling around us. Deal with the problems, but remember that it shouldn't be the problems that define us, it should be our ability to see how much more to life there is than the nuisences that seem to always be coming and going.

Sometimes the size of that windmill depends on the age of its jouster.

From the time I was a teenager and my siblings were not interested in hanging out with me (I was not "cool" like they were) I have had to talk to myself to get any good conversation. At least by talking to myself I never have to worry about not getting a joke or wonder if a different point of view was going to lead to social ostracism.