Nobody puts Smearcase in a corner

Hi this is Franklin. How may I provide excellent sentencing advocacy for you today? Heh. I was just thinking about how rotten it would be if we had to do certain empty, ritualistic bullshit that constitutes the most petty of management's ways of hazing labor. Thanks for taking the time to interview with me today, Mr. Person. Have I provided you with an outstanding social work experience?

This has nothing to do with what I'm writing about.

Oh, the subject line. About that. I don't even remember that movie or know the context of the given utterance. I am just thinking today about how I've backed myself into a corner, and how the world of social work, like the larger working world, is too specialized or has too inflated a sense of specialization.

The thing is I have this great job I miiiight be getting pretty bored of. On days when the normal hours, ample time off, and humane work environment don't seem to cast as long a shadow as the monotony of institutionalized class warfare; I say, on days when parting ways with my mattress seems an inevitable path toward stepping into the street and knocking people's hats off, I look around and think: oh shit. Lhude sing goddamn, indeed.

Does this have sort of a lot of profanity* for a blog about social work?

Well so what I'm fumbling my way toward saying is: what the hell else is there to do out there? I've been at this or approximately this for four years. I've supervised interns for two years, but it's not the same as working as a supervisor. Nobody's going to hire me as an institutional shepherd, and rightly so.

I did clinical work (as I started to say many postings ago, and as I will continue saying at some point soon) for a while, but even if I went back to that...for reasons having something to do with New York State licensing that is a whole other kettle of bitter, regretful, occasionally furious fish, I can't make what you might consider a lateral move to a clinical job for someone 5-10 years out of school.

On the other hand, I can't go back to the job of a beginning clinic worker for quite a few reasons involving salary, temperament, authority, dignity &c. &c.

How do people figure this stuff out? Actually I know this one. People work in organizations where there's up to go, and here there is no up, so I'm left wondering what the next step would be in an organization that didn't have essentially one thin layer of social workers.

Some sort of administrative job is clearly the goal, not because it sounds fascinating (to be honest I don't even know what admin jobs entail for the most part) but because I have in some sense settled for a field that gets no respect, and I want to one day be the guy who gets the smallest lack of respect. I want to be more and do more, in the vaguest possible way.

This is not the stuff cover letters are made of.

I may be stuck now in the position, if you'll pardon me while this turns into kvetching, you're in if you ever try to get a job waiting tables. You cannot possibly learn to wait tables, you begin to understand after a preponderance of rejections, unless you have waited tables before. And you begin to wonderin if the people who are now waiting tables have simply always been waiting tables, since there is no logical starting point--it's just tables all the way down.


*"shit" is obscenity, not profanity. But you take my meaning.