Today there were donuts

And who does not love a donut? It occurs to me that there were donuts only because I work in a mixed setting, i.e. not only social workers--we're just a small department, in fact. The general absence of donuts, as I imagine it, in social work settings (and ok, yes, these are metonymic donuts...unless I mean synecdochal donuts) happens for a few reasons.

First of all there's obvious financial stuff. Wait, hang on though. This is not going to be a complaint blog. I am determined that it is not. I mean 98% of blogs are, to some extent, whineblogs, but I don't want this to be overwhelmingly that. So let me take a few steps back and mention that my workplace, donuts aside, is a humane one. I don't dread coming to work in the morning, and on the days that I do dread coming to work in the morning, I stay home, because I have a good amount of time off and a boss who doesn't view his role (as many bosses do) as that of punishing superego*, and if I tell him I need a mental health day, he asks no questions.

Right then, back to the kvetching. First of all social work is something the increasingly right-center political center of gravity in these here United States appears to want to will out of existence. Srsly, if you think about it, you can judge the worth of things in the public estimation by how they're positioned in the free market, otherwise known as The Measure of All Things. So then look at the incentives:

1) To practice on a professional level, you're going to have to go to a two year program and lay out maybe $20-50K because these programs give very little grant aid.

2) Loan repayment for social work seems to be complicated, hard to find out about, incomplete. In New York State there's a program that pays a lot but it's (of course it is) a lottery. I've entered three years in a row. My understanding of the federal system is I might have 3 years paid off at the end of my TWENTY YEAR REPAYMENT PLAN. I'm sure I'll really enjoy that financial freedom. IN MY FIFTIES.

3) The goddamn salaries. I don't mean to get technical but: oh my fucking god.

4) I imagine if I were an economist I'd have a more precise way of talking about time off as a form of pay, but suffice it to say, this is not a selling point of social work. I compare social work and teaching a lot because a lot of people I know are in both, and teachers work a lot harder than I do but they also get a lot of time off. **

5) You are going to work in a setting where there are rarely donuts because who has money for donuts?! Maybe once in a while you'll get what we used to just call Drug Lunch when some fresh-faced 24-year-old who makes three times what you do brings some lasagna and a wilted salad from the place on the corner so everyone will gather in the conference room, eat a few bites, smile while young Vermont or whatever state they're naming kids these days gives his elevator spiel about the new study that says Paxil treats anxiety about the decline in quality of Wes Anderson's scripts.

Oh, and so on. Anyway the point is why would anyone go into this? Good intentions, sure, but that's not what I would like to be the lone strength of your average social worker. I think we're kind of all doomed if the people who are supposed to fix a lot of these messes are people who have good intentions and not much else in the toolbox. Smart people, for better or worse, eventually want things, and if someone is smart and schmaltzy about saving the world, it's often a matter of time until that balance gets resolved. Good intentions burn out faster than wants/needs, right?

*Let me tell you sometime about my last boss, who we will call Bad Breast. (Hat tip: Melanie Klein, for the most amusing imagery in the history of man's inquiries into the mind.)

**Even compared to me at my cushy job with lots of time off. Honestly, I've set a timeline for myself where two years is about the longest I'm going to stay here, but I live in dread of some job where you get two weeks off a year.