Extreme Sports

This is not about social work so much as work in general. It's on my mind right now because, well, the cat kept waking me from about what I'd guess was 5 a.m. to feed her, only it was 5 a.m. so I couldn't figure out what she might want and kept just pushing her aside, muttering obscenities you wouldn't usually say to a cat, and going shallowly back to sleep for three minutes until she redoubled her efforts. No, I promise this isn't going to be catblogging. We are not on Livejournal here. It's just that I am especially unable to perform ordinary mental tasks this morning, because I do not function at all well on sleep deficit.

The first thing to go is my ability to multi-task. I'm not good at it to begin with. I'm better at mono-tasking, which I believe in ancient times was called "working." Actually you know what this makes me think of is the time I interviewed to work at Large HIV Organization of Anonymity and I was totally digging the interviewer until she said to me "how are you under pressure? Because at Large HIV Organization, we don't multi-task, we hyper-task!" Or maybe it was mega-task. Something really self-dramatizing and redolent of corporatization and a professional ethos that makes me insane, about which I am using this entry to kvetch.

Well wait. This does turn out to be specifically about social work. Because I'm afraid there's an unpsoken, eh, thing* where we assume our jobs are going to suck the life out of us and accept it, so organizations don't make much of an effort to prevent this.

Here's another bad interview story. This time, substance abuse treatment, and at some point in the interview for the job (which I don't really want, which I'm not good at hiding) I stumble on the answer to a question and say "I don't really know how to answer that," to which my interviewer extremely sourly responds "well, this is a job interview." Later in the interview she'll ask if I have any questions and I'll say "sure, is this a good place to work?" and she'll say "I don't know how to answer that question" and I will spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn't say "well, this is a job interview." Sometimes late at night I consider trying really hard to remember her name, googling her extension at the agency, and leaving her a voicemail consisting of me screaming WELL THIS _IS_ A JOB INTERVIEW.

All I'm really talking about is the idea we have that we are going to be have enormous caseloads, have to mega-task, get minimal support, get Dangerfieldian levels of respect, and of course make too little to comfortably pay back our loans. This is of course the fault of agencies, and of a society uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might need help and so, to some degree, with the idea that anyone might get paid ("my hard-earned tax-payer money") to provide it. But I think we're complicit in it. We identify with our misery, make it part of our professional culture. Those sad fucks in Far the Fuckaway, they neither expected nor seemed to want better, you know? It's no way to live.

I don't know where one begins to address this. I'm just running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.

*Vocabulary is the second thing to go.