It is one thing to be an underpaid adjunct lecturer. It is entirely another to be an unpaid adjunct lecturer. As an underpaid lecturer, you get to at least eat while you bitch about your plight. As an unpaid lecturer, you just bitch. You don't even get a cocktail to soften the blow of the day.
Due to the horrific joke called our economy, the community college I work for had to slash its budget dramatically, which put part-timers like me on the chopping block faster than a lamb at a biblical slaughter get-together. The English department had to cut its budget by 12.9% for the academic year. The only way to achieve this and keep everyone employed was to take some of us (I mean me and a few other schmucks) off of full instructional time and place us on non-instructional assignments. Note that the first three letters of "assignment" describes a particular state of being. Non-instructional assignments, for the layman, are hours clocked doing something other than teaching, for example, sitting in a writing lab, or contemplating suicide.
My non-instructional assignment came in the form of monitoring the new English Lab at a satellite campus deep in the 'hood. The "campus," which consists of one sad building that strikingly resembles the local County Jail, reflects the principles of a community college, as the whole community--enrolled or not enrolled--come into the building. The unenrolled come in because they have learned that there are computers with Internet access inside. The enrolled come because they have to.
Most things I can live with, like the girls who answer their cell phones in the lab and proceed to have a full-volume conversation with their baby's daddy. Even the people who punctuate every sentence, not to mention every independent clause, dependent clause, preposition and transitional adverb with "my nigga" give me little pause. The "students" who don't have any business within a 100-foot radius of the building but come in to print out their travel itineraries don't bother me so much, either. It's being saddled with a program that I will appropriately title Gateway to Hell that raises the hackles on the back of my neck.
Gateway to Hell is a program designed for high school students who don't "fit in" to normal school environments (Translation: teens from 15 to 19 years old who have dropped out of school, are gang members, are apprenticing prostitutes, or are doing this because the terms of their parole require it). One or two good students who actually want to be there to learn something and move on with their lives have somehow been gathered up with their contemporaries and have to endure the same crap as the rest of us. But for the most part the program consists of kids who have never experienced a boundary in their lives and are in desperate need of therapy and a healthy dose of shock treatments. Let's just say that they didn't do so hot in finishing school.
Note: yes, I understand and have a profound appreciation for the fact that these children--because they are children--come from a variety of highly fascinating forms of dysfunctional families. In the first six weeks, I learned more about being a street kid, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism and drug abuse, mental illness, eating disorders and social workers than I thought I would in a year. But since they applied for the program, since they said they wanted a 15th chance, since they said they were "college ready," and since the staff running the program told us the same thing--which they knew at the time was bollocks--my sympathy has quickly run dry.
Maybe if they didn't come in for their required lab hours so high kites would be envious, or if they actually did something other than look for ultimate fighting footage online, or if they stopped spending all their time uploading pictures from their cell phones and trying to score dates on facebook, I might be more tolerant. I might be more easy going if, when I told them they are supposed to be working on their papers, since it is, like, the English lab, they didn't look at me like they wanted to jump me later in the parking lot and then go right back to checking out tire rims. I might feel more warm and fuzzy if I felt like I could leave my belongings in the lab when I go to the bathroom--but I can't, since they've stolen crap from other people who work for the program. I might feel the milk of human kindness flow through me a little if I actually got paid for the work.
But I haven't been paid in over a month, because the Gateway to Hell program screwed up the accounting. I am being paid for my instructional hours, but not the non-instructional ones, the ones for which I really need some kind of reason not to blow my head off with a shotgun. I am not the only person who's experiencing this. I'm just the one who's most pissed off about it. It is one thing to work in little South Central with the Future Thugs of America. It is entirely another to not get paid for it.
I'm certain that if this had happened to the chair of our department, or one of the administrators for the Gateway to Hell program, an emergency check would have been cut toot sweet. But no, I am making calls, doing the rounds, and am getting ready to call my union, for what seems like the thousandth time.
The situation once again reminds me of how awful this particular community college is. This is a college that had to slash budgets, but managed to waste millions of dollars on two construction projects that, now over budget to an alarming extent, have to be put on hold. This is the school that every few years has some kind of scandal about misappropriation of funds, for which one or another bigwig at the school is responsible. This is the school that, despite the fact it has 40,000 students, can't stay above water, even if you threw it a life preserver. This is a community college where someone actually suggested that, in order to bridge the budget gap, we allow private entities to sponsor classes. Sure! Why not? We'll get Coca-Cola to sponsor Health and Nutrition classes, and the Pro-Life people can sponsor the classes in Childhood Development. While we're at it, let's get the KKK to sponsor Religious Studies classes.
Cut the f#*@ing shit.
How is it that the people doing the work for which community colleges are best known and which they espouse--providing access to higher education for the more challenged and disenfranchised members of our community--are the ones not getting paid? The Chancellor goes home to a lovely, warm place where the bills are most likely paid and few threats of bankruptcy and destitution hang over their head. Full-timers get to teach overload while part-timers go wait tables. Landscaping is lovely and the new buildings on campus are immaculate. But I'm wondering how I can turn chunk tuna from a can into an interesting, exciting, and hopefully halfway tasty meal. At least I don't have any cats I have to fight with for the lion's share. I don't get combat pay, although I deserve it, if not, at the very least, a flak jacket and a Howitzer.
The woman in Payroll who is supposedly the nexus point of this clusterfuck has been unavailable, out of her office, hard to reach, not doing her job. I'm sure she's off somewhere enjoying her pay, doing things like putting gas in her car, buying groceries, paying a hit man to finally put an end to her unhappy marriage, which is most likely the fault of a lack of organization and empathy on her part, if her job performance is any kind of reflection. And when she gets back to her desk, She might even clock some overtime, since she has a lot of catching up to do.
She's not the only one who's asleep at the wheel, as is obvious to almost all of us now. I want to track down this woman and her ilk and have them locked in stocks in a public square so I can throw rotten vegetables and fish heads at them, before I move on to bricks and pit bulls. At least they'll be getting paid while they're being abused. I don't even have that right now.
It is one thing to have a job in which you are supposed to take deal with other people's laziness, sloth, bad attitude, wastefulness, corruption and general stupidity. But it is another ball of wax altogether to not get paid for it.
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