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For today’s installment of Let’s Compartmentalize Maria’s Head, I’d like to talk about my job.

My job and my happiness have been forever married, no matter how diligently I try to divorce them. “Leave your personal life at the door.” “Leave work at work!” I’d love to do both of those things, but I suck at it. If things aren’t going well at work, it makes me feel like crap everywhere else in life. I think it’s because growing up, work was such a big deal. I started working at 14, and for most of my life, my mom worked two jobs. Everyone around me worked. My dad, who didn’t have much of a work ethic after divorcing my mom, was always broke and not paying child support. He was only good at accruing debt, not money. And because of this, my main fears in life aren’t dying in a horrible crash or World War 3. They’re as follows:

1. Getting knocked up

2. Being unemployed

I’m sure there are worse things in the world, but those are the two most stressful thoughts to me. So for someone so obsessed with work, you’d think I’d have found a job eventually that makes it so I’m not stressed to death and feeling like shit all the time, right?

Nope!

In Part 2, I went over why my last job sucked, in brief. It paid a lot, but going made me absolutely miserable. Plus, I wanted to work in education anyway. So when I made the move to Kansas City, I looked for college admissions jobs! That was the other job offer I got when I graduated from college, so why not? Helping people get into college sounds great. Had it not been for my admissions rep and especially financial aid, navigating college would have been MUCH harder for me. So really, working in admissions would be paying it forward.

After many resumes and emails, I got hired by a proprietary university. Sure I’d never heard of it, being from Iowa, but every metro area seems to have their small technical and proprietary schools. The students who come here were looking for realistic solutions, ways to get an education that they could work around their jobs and kids that were actually credible. My job was to help them through the process, but also search their souls, uncover their problems, and get them motivated. Get them geared up for school, which most of them haven’t been to in years and are scared shitless of. Convince them that no, they don’t have to work at Taco Bell their whole life. It sounded like not only would I be helping people, but it’d be the people who REALLY needed it.

Reality check. I sit at a desk every day dialing “leads” who may or may not be interested in going back to school. Sometimes I get hung up on. Sometimes people tell me they’re not interested, or ask a few questions and hang up. Every once in a while, I get someone to come in and talk to me about school. Most of the time, though, I hear a lot of voicemails. I leave a lot of voicemails that are never returned. I don’t know where a lot of the “leads” are generated from – mostly internet ads, I presume. Those are the ones that don’t turn into much, though.

My dials are counted. My phone calls are recorded. We have meetings that should take five minutes but end up lasting 30. We operate like a sales floor. During my training, I learned that I was entering the “people improvement business” yet we’re graded on how many people we call, how many we talk to, how many we interview, how many we enroll, how many sit in class, how many referrals we get, et cetera. Yes, the place takes money to run. Yes, everyone needs to be measured somehow. But we have the same number of “leads” and a growing number of reps. Shit’s getting thin and numbers are getting hard. I’m probably going to have to start sharing an office soon (one of the reasons I took the job? having my own office after sitting in a low-walled cube farm). This isn’t about education and helping people. It’s about getting people in the door and filling seats, at least with the way we run it right now. I’d already been in sales. I came to education to help people, which is what I want to do as a teacher, and why I want to be a teacher. I want to help, to pass on knowledge. I don’t want to be a telemarketer. I don’t want to feel like I’m swindling people.

In its defense, the school I work for does have very good, accredited programs. I don’t think it’s the schools fault. Just some sub-institutional methods and attitudes getting away from what the point of our job is. At least at my last job, it was sales and it wasn’t pretending to be anything else. Right now I feel like I’m doing sales all dressed up in a better-your-life suit.

It’s not what I signed up for. It’s just my only option for the time being. And it sucks.