I’ve had some interesting jobs over the years. But for most of them, money wasn’t a negotiable item. I needed work, and took the job because there was rent to be made, and few alternatives. Honestly, I’d have loved for there to have been negotiations – ” No. You’ll have to sweeten the deal a bit more, or I’ll have to take that job on offer down the street.” About that time, I’d hear the piano playing the movie’s theme music in the background as the titles rolled. What a fantasy.
Onward!
When I left grad school, there was a recession going on, and I was pleased to get an offer to work on a hospital’s medical/surgical floor. I had a large grey cat who got aggressive when hungry, rent to pay, and school loans coming due. Talking to some of the Operating Room staff led to an offer to return to the OR, and scrubbing as a technician. I had, at the time, not yet left the Doctoral program, and as a joke, a few of the surgeons I worked with would address me, with a twinkle in their eyes, as Doctor Carreras.
I wanted desperately to be able to use my degrees in anthropology. So I kept looking. After two years back in the OR, I found a job that allowed me to work in the applied field. It paid shit money. But I was happy. There was essentially no money negotiation, but I committed to it because otherwise all my years of study and my goals would have been down the drain.
Come Seven, Come Eleven!
The truth is that an education is a gamble. Periodically, waves of new grads emerge into job markets that have crashed for their field. I truly wish that the media would handle these events in an adult manner. It’s a recurrent phenomenon. That it’s happening in the IT field now does not mean that it never happened before.
The answer that is suggested, as a panacea, is that “we always need tradesmen – electricians, carpenters…” In the words of an old wiseman, “Bullshit!” The world does not need an endless supply of tradesmen. There would soon be a glut of those, too, if you began mass production.
Druthers?
So what would I do if money were not an object? Probably return to my layabout days as a folksinger. Lousy money, but real good company, and interesting goings on. A second choice would be to return in some capacity to the surgical world. In some ways, I never left it. It left a stamp on me. Third? I’d love to travel around and write a blog on the subterranean lifestyles of the obscure and hip. No not the wealthy hoodoos and their stolen culture. This would be about the lives of little-known groups living interesting lives – park rangers in National Forests, non-elite artists in their studios, that sort of stuff. It would be a grand fusion of my years as an anthropologist, pius Itinerant, and folksinger all tied up in one.
Not the sort of stuff that would make you rich, but oh, the stories you’d have to tell, the experiences you’d have!
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