Recently in Career Category

We have heard now from a few people who got call backs in the comments section of my first entry about my American Inventor audition. It's been very interesting hearing from people around the country about their audition experience and I very much appreciate their posting!

Best of luck to those who have been called!

But on to the bitterness and regrets -- how can they resist the Wondue Crock???!!! maybe I should have gone with scrunci undies?? -- I'm still kind of hoping I'll get called in some third-round of calls or something -- maybe the producers will remember how succinctly I gave my presentation?? In the meantime, it will definitely make watching the show more interesting. And I can't really complain; after all, I was on boingboing, Canadian AM radio, and was interviewed by a reporter for Fortune Small Business calling from Buenos Aries.

A girl can only ask for so much fame and fortune, I guess.

I hope we will continue to hear from the intrepid inventors who make it!!

I knew there were some old great ideas that I still hadn't blogged about and I just remembered one. This is one I had when I was temping in San Francisco, jeesh, like 12 years ago. My idea was this:

When you start a job, they always take you around and introduce you to people. When you're a temp, you have nothing to lose. So, I wanted to tell people:

"Hi, my name is Mary, but all my friends call me Knockers."

Or Stinky. I couldn't figure out which was funnier. The first time I thought of this I laughed so loud I startled myself -- I was walking up a really steep hill by myself and had to stop and think about it. I still think it's pretty funny. Other people I've told this to haven't thought it was so funny, so I've had to explain that the people meeting you would have to figure out if they wanted to keep calling you Mary, and seem rude because they didn't want to be your friend, or if they were going to call you Stinky or Knockers and risk being rude because those are rude names.

The whole idea of rude or outgrown nicknames I find kind of funny. I remember we had someone in my school named Stinky, and he was a really funny, really charismatic guy, from what I remember. He was a couple years older and had a hairlip. Anyway, one year he said he didn't want to be called Stinky, and I was like, "but that's his name! what's he thinking?". I understand better now. I've had or tried to coin a few nicknames in my time, but they've never really stuck: Ace (someone told me too late that you're not supposed to name yourself Ace, you're supposed to wait for it to be applied to you in spontaneous appreciation of your skills of some kind); Breakfast; Noodles. Then there were the stage names: Daisy, Elektra, Monique. Those have a half life of about 2/3rds of an AC/DC song.

Now, I stick to Mary. I didn't even change my name when I got married, although it did occur to me. At this point, it's too late to change my name, except for maybe if I need to go into witness protection or something.

I know a lot of academics, and none of them are very good negotiators. Well, okay, I know at least one high powered acacemic is. But for the most part, everyone seems to settle for a crappy office with crappy chairs, crappy computers, inadequate bookshelves, not to mention the lousy pay, crushing workload, no travel funds, etc.

Anyway, I've worked out the *need* for this service more than the actual profit model for it, but I think that, given the loosy-goosy nature of a lot of academic hiring, academics need agents to help them negotiate things like salary, courseload, travel funds, release time, tenure, etc. This way, when you were looking for a job and got an offer, you could just say, "You'll have to talk to my agent" after a certain point.

I don't mean merely a literary agent -- although that would be part of the job, or maybe they'd work together. I mean some woman or man who would look really slick (in an appropriately academic way -- actually, wouldn't it be great if the ghost of Foucault was your agent? Nobody would screw with you then) who would play hardball with the hiring committee, and later on the dean.

Sure, at first it would be a hard living being an academic agent -- it's not like academics make that much so there's a lot of fat to skim off. But eventually, if we all had them, it would pay off, because we would all get more money, some of which we could then use to pay the agent, and then the agents would then increase salaries more, etc. Eventually, a lot more academics would be commanding rock star or sports star salaries, and when you came to give a talk it would be green M&Ms all the way, baby -- or they'd be hearing from your agent.

I had this idea partly after dealing with some hard ball academics -- real jerks, if you want to know the truth, but they got extra funds, that's for sure. Perhaps if they farmed that job out to an agent they'd still be nice human beings instead of manipulative assholes (I'm deliberaty refraining from linking here.)

But I'm not quitting any one of my day jobs to do this one.

By the way, I was looking around for pictures of booksheves and found this instead (there is a picture of a bookshelf somewhere on the site). Interesting, especially given that some of my early youth was spent on a hippy communue in Southern Oregon called Jump Off Joe. The hippy commune I linked to there isn't the one we lived on, but it does mention it or anyway Jump Off Joe (which was the name of a creek near the commune).