{"id":23762,"date":"2019-03-05T17:18:50","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T21:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=23762"},"modified":"2019-03-05T17:18:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T21:18:50","slug":"overworked-up-and-not-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2019\/03\/05\/overworked-up-and-not-out\/","title":{"rendered":"(Over)worked Up and Not Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"What<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In January I started a new job (woo me!), but I still don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve gotten over the one I left yet, nor the job application process it took to get here. Below are some reflections on that experience, which I share mainly to process them.<\/em><\/p>\n

On my last day working at the university as an office support assistant (four years almost to the day), I published one more issue of the biweekly program newsletter one last time. In a short goodbye to readers, I found myself recalling another assistant who published her department\u2019s newsletter\u2014my mom. \u201cShe delighted in the visual design aspects, adding new flourishes and sections,\u201d I wrote, remembering her face lighting up in the car on the drive home from high school when she\u2019d find the perfect clipart or goofy pun to slip into the margins. Even after leaving the university herself, she likes crafting cards and mom memes in Publisher 2007, her visual design program of choice.<\/p>\n

For both of us, making and remixing the newsletter offered a repeatable and at times innately satisfying diversion from the more fastidious duties usually delegated to assistants (among other even lower status\/precarious workers, from part-time undergrads and interns to building maintenance and outside contractors).<\/p>\n

Yet despite what joy the newsletter sparked, it amounted to maybe 10% of my job. Out of the remaining work, the kind I preferred was, ironically, the most seemingly dull and monotonous. Pulling columns and columns of census data for every county in the state and collating them into a sprawling Excel spreadsheet. Deleting hundreds (thousands?) of duplicate participant entries from a MySQL database. Scraping dozens of farmers market listings for changes in hours, location, contact info, etc. If it involved Excel and blocking hours on my schedule, I was interested.<\/p>\n

Typing out the key commands in rote succession quickly became rhythmic, percussive \u2013 ctrl-c, alt-tab, ctrl-v, tab-tab, ctrl-c… The term \u201cdesk jockey\u201d took on a more literal dimension. Any mistakes I made I could feel through my fingertips and in my ears, like playing warmup scales on the flute in middle school band. The sameness of the work was, for me, a feature, not a bug.<\/p>\n

\"Gif<\/p>\n

The repetitive moving, arranging and cleaning<\/a> of data wasn\u2019t creative or intellectually stimulating, which made it ideal for zoning out. One of a dozen miscellaneous, usually manual-intensive tasks often labeled \u201cjob security\u201d because almost anyone could do them, but due to higher priorities and workloads, almost no one else would. In this way the forms of upkeep that office assistants do\u2014processing and updating various data, addressing and routing correspondence from internal and external entities, tidying up around meetings (and documenting them in minute-taking), keeping the storeroom organized\u2014blend elements of conventional domestic labor with data maintenance. We process and file data and serve as human interfaces or resources within our organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cData maintenance is particularly consequential in medicine,\u201d professor Shannon Mattern noted in her recent column for Places Journal<\/a><\/em>, \u201cand thus caring for medical sites, objects, communities, and data has been recognized as an important part of caring for patients.\u201d Maintenance in clinical trials, for example, entails \u201ccalibrating instruments, cleaning data \u2026 retaining participants\u2026\u201d Likewise the participants of medical studies \u201cespecially patients with chronic illnesses, sometimes adopt what Laura Forlano calls \u2018broken body thinking\u2019 \u2013 \u2018actively participating in, maintaining, repairing, and caring for \u2026\u2019 pumps, sensors, monitors, needles and vials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shannon\u2019s analysis<\/a> really resonated with me at the time I read it (seriously, please read it<\/a>). It appeared in my twitter feed, via eve massacre<\/a> probably, at the point in my job search when the burnout from doing my assistant job was compounding the exhaustion of the apply-prepare-interview-wait-rejected cycle.<\/p>\n

Each new email from hiring personnel that concluded with some variation on we\u2019ve decided to pursue other\/more qualified applicants<\/em> reiterated which kinds of working experience \u2018added value\u2019\u2014problem-solving<\/em>, creativity<\/a>\u2014and which kinds detracted\u2014supporting, preserving, caretaking. A downrating of not just office assistants specifically but of all workers in feminized roles, routinely passed over by employers because of their generalized titles and their experiences performing a variety of necessary, often less visible, frequently physically and mentally-taxing, and in many cases emotionally-demanding<\/a> work.<\/p>\n

In my new position as an instructional technologist in the online education group at my alma mater, the upkeep I do now (troubleshooting, fixing and updating online courses) attains a higher status and the recognition and pay such specialization confers. The fact that my new employers hired me ostensibly for, rather than in spite of, a proficiency in many of the same skills I honed as an assistant, though personally vindicating as it might be, doesn\u2019t resolve or refute the reality that such advances come as exceptions to the rule.<\/p>\n

Header image<\/a>, based on\u00a0Little Niddles<\/a>\u00a0comic, via Gabi Schaffzin<\/a> via @abolish83<\/a> via @theguerrillafeminist<\/a> (whew!)<\/p>\n

Ghost in the Shell<\/em> gif<\/a><\/p>\n

Nathan is on Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In January I started a new job (woo me!), but I still don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve gotten over the one I left yet, nor the job application process it took to get here. Below are some reflections on that experience, which I share mainly to process them. On my last day working at the university […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2038"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23762"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23769,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23762\/revisions\/23769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}