Fallen Through The Cracks

 

One-twentieth of the shelves I worked through

If you follow my Twitter stream, you may have noticed that last week I was particularly quiet, only surfacing occasionally to report on how good the weather was in Nottingham. I was working at the university for an academic friend of mine, cataloguing thousands and thousands and thousands of books at his office and then his house. This process alone took me four days, but on Thursday I took a break and worked with my favourite poet instead, editing her work in preparation for the selection that will go in the book. 

It's not the first time that I am welcomed in offices and houses to have a good snoop around books. The upshot of all of this dust inhaling is that I always have a good flick of the most interesting volumes and that I exist on a healthy diet of coffee and sweets provided by my hosts. As I was scanning and typing (and I was using this software which is fantastic), my mind hopped and skipped through my entire adult life, juggling flashbacks from my own uni days to the present, wondering about the choices I took and the ones that were taken on my behalf. 

As I was working in my friend's office, the odd colleague came and went, mostly barely acknowledging my presence at the desk, for I obviously looked like nothing other than a lowly filing assistant and as all lowly filing assistants I was probably not really worth engaging with. 

When you have a PhD (or when you're finishing it or are correcting it, in other words when the major work is over), you're expected to be a bona fide academic. If you're not, for whatever reason, you're not quite good enough. Well, obviously. 

Compare and contrast this with my being a PhD student when I was, in fact, working full-time as a management consultant. When the news of my academic endeavours got out of the bag, I consistently fought the implicit message that I wasn't quite committed to my job because after a twelve-hour day I would return to my digs to study and write instead of joining the piss-up at the closest pub. Fellow consultants didn't appreciate, nor understand, the resilience needed to do two demanding projects at the same time, and now that I have dropped the management consulting side of things, academics don't understand what it entailed to work for a Fortune 500 company here, there and everywhere while continuing my research at PhD level. When people, in and out of the academia, tell me that 'they work late', they mean 6.45 pm if that, but in my mind it always means a slice of pizza in the office and a cab home at 11.30 pm after I started at 7 am on the dot. Now that's working late.

So why was I thinking about all of this as I was moving from shelf to shelf, book to book? Because I pretty much resigned myself to society's need to pigeonhole us at the first available opportunity. If you do a PhD, then you are expected to tick all of the PhD-related boxes, which usually mean you are only slightly technologically minded but hob-nob with academics at conferences over stale biscuits and crap coffee. If you are business-minded because of your work experience, you're obviously well-versed in, say, the use of technology, but God forbid you have other intellectual interests, you cannot be committed to your job if you do. 

Therefore it goes that someone who can tick both sets of boxes qualifies as nothing more than a hybrid, a Jack of all trades, an unspecialised moron of sorts. While making a virtue of necessity is the ultimate quality, it in fact turns people like me into professionals whom everyone considers 'semi-professionals' and as such, and here is the best part of all, shouldn't really be rewarded for their troubles. 

A friend of mine says that most people think a freelancer is someone who works for free.  How bitterly did I laugh the first time I heard it, but let me be clear on this most vital point: I never take a job that doesn't pay. Ever. And as a writer, or perhaps editor or proofreader, I urge you never to take a job that doesn't pay handsomely either (and you decide how handsome is handsome). 

But doing what I do I always have to turn down jobs that offer little more than peanuts. A couple of weeks ago I was approached by an agency (avoid, avoid, avoid like the Black Death) for an interpreting job 120 miles from here. Pay: £ 60 for my troubles, with an abysmal allowance for petrol (and petrol retails at £ 1.20 a liter around here), zero for parking and the very real possibility that I would have had to leave home at 8 am and wouldn't be back before 3 pm. Do the maths, and I would have made less than the minimum wage. Why giving me £ 60 at all? Why not asking me whether I would do it for free, so that the agency itself can make a clear £ 500 on my assignment while I don't even meet my expenses, let alone make a profit? Why indeed dear reader. 

There is nothing, and I really do mean nothing, that makes me happier or more proud than receiving a happy email from a workshop participant after I've returned home. Nothing. It makes me feel light and airy, like Forrest Gump's feather carried by the wind to God only knows where. Knowing that I've been really helpful for someone is the greatest reward of all. And this is the ultimate reason for penning this slightly inarticulate, slightly ranty post today. You make it all worth it, but many, many, many people make me question whether I should feel fallen through the cracks of the system when, in reality, I worked my ass off to be who I am. 

 

Comments

[Amelia]

I guess we are here to break the moulds dear Steph. I have many a rant brewing in my head about how mothers are seen, creative artists, single parents, some-one with 2 degree's who free-lances doing things she likes and it does make me smile when you don't quite fit the pigeon-hole that people find it eaiser to put people in. I guess we all do it to a certain extent though.

I have recently been coming across this whole concept of charging what you think you are worth. Ironically when I was desperate for work I would do it for little because I needed the dosh so badly, then it got to a stage where lots of free-lance work was coming in but I didn't really want to do it, so I put my prices up (because I wasn't so desperate!) and lo, I got the jobs anyway, or sold a couple of pieces of more expensive work . . . . . it taught me a lesson by default. I was sending out a message that me or my time was valuable and because I thought that, they must have thought that too . . . . you go girl, no peanuts for you :)

Amelia.xx

[Shannon Garcia]

"Therefore it goes that someone who can tick both sets of boxes qualifies as nothing more than a hybrid, a Jack of all trades, an unspecialised moron of sorts. While making a virtue of necessity is the ultimate quality, it in fact turns people like me into professionals whom everyone considers 'semi-professionals' and as such, and here is the best part of all, shouldn't really be rewarded for their troubles."

I groaned in recognition at this part... I've been a pro in a few very different circles, and it never fails to irk me that having a lot of knowledge or training in one field supposedly makes you inept at another (even if you have the same level of qualifications there). Thankfully not everyone is like that, but it's still tiresome. I cling to the Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects.

Happy 21-ing... final week!

[Steph]

Amelia, Shannon, thanks for your kind words and YES, I agree with both of you. We're here to break the moulds and pigeonholes are for insects. And I'll try and break out of that hole if it kills me, so there.