(With apologies to Wallace Stevens.)

I

If you, like me, are currently looking for a job other than your own, or any job at all, most of this may be old hat.

Some of it, coming from a guy who’s been on the hunt for all of two months, might even frustrate you. Feel free to vent about your own difficulties in the comments.

II

When I started looking for jobs this time, I knew it was uphill. I didn’t expect to find something quickly, but I did hope to at least catch an interview or two in a couple months.

I’m at three out-of-hand rejections and a whole lot of radio silence, which in some cases might as well be the same thing, and in some other cases is explicitly the same thing.

III

Full disclosure: that’s out of, at current count, eleven applications.

That may not appropriately broadcast the degree of my desperation to leave teaching. Truthfully, I considered going in for administrative or secretarial work, since that might at least let me punch out and move on with my life.

A friend pointed out that it could kill my chances of ever coming back to anything more academic, so I’ve been looking at jobs that fit what I think is a pretty impressive set of skills.¹ Not that it’s mattered.

IV

A job and a person
Are one.
A job and a person and a résumé
Are one.²

V

Shitposting aside, before you try to remind me of the Present Horrors, I should clarify: I’m not delusional. Companies have every reason not to hire right now, they don’t want to train new employees anyway, and I’ve made things way harder by trying to leave my field. Not that I have much choice, if I want to leave my job.³

VI

Frankly, I don’t see why I have to give unilateral grace to these HR types and hiring managers, not when these job descriptions usually have glaring errors—obvious misspellings, dismembered sentences—and a decent portion have obvious marks of Bullshit Machine product, and meanwhile I spend hours finding the most natural places to fit keywords from the job description into my papers,⁴ so the algorithms that do most of the other half’s work will acknowledge my existence.⁵

VII

No matter the job, every firm can and does expect a tailor-made candidate to exist out there. Often enough, it’s because that candidate (or their boss) wrote the posting in the first place, and it only existed publicly to avoid a lawsuit.

Under this kind of circumstance, being told no is at least a recognition that you existed in the process, if only for how long it took to reject you out of hand. Sending an email is the least you can do.⁶

VIII

March 2023: my student loans are finally forgiven (thanks, Betsy) and, for the first time, I feel less trapped in my job.

Do I look for other jobs? No! Because, like an idiot, I think things are improving at my workplace, in no small part because of me. I want to be around to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Instead things get so much worse, so quickly, that I don’t have time to put together an escape plan.

IX

Sometimes I wonder if these HR types see a teacher applying for jobs mid-school-year and reject them immediately.

After all, if you won’t stick it out until the summer when you’re in charge of children, who are our future, surely no self-respecting workplace can trust you!

What kind of monster places their own needs and mental health above of the martyrdom they have clearly signed up to do for the rest of their lives, so someone else doesn’t have to? That’s why we offer all these interesting jobs in the winter and spring, so they won’t be tempted!

X

If you’ve known me for longer than half an hour, you know I’ve wanted to be a priest since I was in high school, and you know that I haven’t stopped hearing the call since.

There are days where I wonder if the fact that my job applications get treated like biohazard material is a sign. Maybe I’m supposed to listen to the voice in my head that hasn’t shut up in twenty years, even though I know—I think I know—I’m not ready.

XI

Maybe I think that because the alternative is that the last fifteen years of making people’s lives easier, smoother, faster, better, very little of it done for transactional reasons, has been a complete waste of time.

In my better moments, I know that’s not true. There are friends watching out for jobs, helping me assemble documents, listening to me when I complain about how much it sucks to get a notification for a job that’s no longer accepting applications⁷, and I don’t think they’d be sticking by me if I were the total empty space this job search is convincing me I am.⁸

The problem is I have fewer of those moments every week.

XII

Among other things, I made this bed.

I mean, I didn’t make all of it. I didn’t tell the United States to elect a genocidal maniac and his pack of cronies. I didn’t start a war with Iran.

But I’m the one who picked teaching as a career, because I’d met so many writers who worked at schools as a day job.⁹

There have been very few hands extended in my direction over my career, but I’m the one who’s turned them away, convinced that one day I’d be rewarded for building a life entirely off my own talent and elbow grease. God forbid this country live up to a single one of its stated values.

XIII

Someone hire me. Please.