Vorshtein

I started to post about my first job, but it started getting long and maybe a little like a therapy session. I'm a little bit interested in people's stories of professional disaster, because I had a few, and tend to say to people "there are a lot of bad social work jobs out there" based on not that much evidence, but I can't help but think it's true. It might be interesting to post about later if there turns out to be much traffic around here. I saw a few hits from here and there already, which is gratifying.

There are a few things hanging out in my brain that I want to talk about, but otherwise it may be wise just to write about the things that happen day to day here. I'm not exactly writing this to get out my own frustrations or to edify anyone. I guess I like the potential sense of community that blogs offer, even if it's a fragile sort of community.

Today was slow, and that's a topic in itself, though I'm not sure how to go at it. What I'm interested in is that I have a lot of down time, and I need a lot of downtime, and I've always assumed everyone does. And in the job I started to type about, for instance, there was this immense effort at putting on a pageant of everyone being busy every moment. How anyone could survive that I don't know, or why they'd want to.

Look the value of work is that it gets something done that needs done. Somehow this has been turned on its side in American culture. Think about this in the most basic way: Suppose you were completely done with what you have to do today, and you said to your boss "I'd like to go home now." Your boss would of course assume you were speaking hypothetically, and would say "sweet fancy Moses, so would I!" You would not go home.

The particular social work side of this is how it's been institutionalized, or this is my hunch as I sit here and type with my ass. I mean not literally. That's like "talking out your ass," an expression I sometimes use and then think I'm making it up and think I sound vulgar/crazy and remind myself next time to say "talking out my sleeve" which I'm not sure exists either but at least it doesn't give people nightmares.

Where was I? Well, think about audits, the things that define work in a clinic. One could only believe these occur for the benefit of clients* if one were being paid to believe this. They are there to make sure that social workers are not playing FreeCell or writing blogs or napping under the desk (what, you don't?) during the last fifteen minutes of sessions. They are there to make sure not only are you doing something that can make for a convincing progress note for most of the session, but that you are using the end of that session to write that convincing progress note. I really do think this is true.

Like all other exercises of authority, what they mostly do is inspire methods of subversion. I don't even know if they still do this, but quarterly progress reports--themselves an abomination--used to call for, what was it called, a performance review or some piece of meaningless jargon like that, might as well just call it a vorshtein, and they had to have this long sentence at the end of them that was a kind of formulaic language beyond all reason, and so eventually we all just learned what was supposed to be there, got very adept at writing vorshteins quickly and writing one individualizing detail at the end, and getting an LCSW to sign off, which they did without reading because nobody had any illusion that there was a point to this.

Things like this, if you squint at them right, they are important roots of societal problems. Because they mean that the people who will stay in those jobs are people who are okay with writing vorshteins rather than doing anything meaningful. I'd rather have someone lazy in a job than someone who could spend ten years writing vorshteins. Hell, maybe those people like them. Maybe they write them for fun, or do cross-stitch vorshteins.

This is how the unfortunately aggregated and decentralized villain that is, I guess, the imaginary will of heartless capitalism makes sure people who don't deserve anything never get a shot at having it. That sentence is terrible, but maybe you know what I mean? I'll try this again: the structure of our working life suggests that someone out there doesn't want us to do any good. It's like the argument of intelligent design, inverted: things could not have gone this wrong without a decision that they should be so. And yet, probably not a constructive thing to imagine.

Probably this is all simplistic and muddled to people with a bigger mind for big systemic grokking of things than I have, but it feels worth bumbling my way through.

*or consumers or customers or cupcakes or whatever term we are now supposed to use; again, not an issue of importance to the cupcakes themselves.