Crazy Job

Workers in a job that makes no sense, exists only because others have no job, know somewhere in their minds that their job should disappear,could disappear. A distant burocratic whim might mean sudden unemployment. They begin to behave like those experiment rats that fight with and eat each other.

Marina's job would disappear in a rational world. Last night she found out that N proposed himself for B's old job running the Center City literacy program. Never mind that B is not the incumbent only because she graciously agreed to take over the Edgecity program where the last three directors failed to survive Xiomara's piranha management. N dissed B when her name came up to take over the expanded Center City program. Now Marina knows why. Cannibalizing each others' jobs, it's come to this. The rats are eating each other. Marina imagines N would just as easily go after her job. When he was offered Marina's old title because Marina was going to work part time,he never came to talk to her. Did he think she was about to be fired? And now how is Marina supposed to go in on Monday and talk to him as if she doesn't know he's a job cannibal?

All this betraying over such small stakes: the dregs of capitalism. Those who have jobs because others don't, who are charged with dishing out the portions of the master's leavings alloted to the field slaves (who no longer have fields, who are paid just enough to keep consuming; until they are slid or battered into one of the other pens, the criminal justice system, or the mental health system...). Because they administer the expendable these workers are also expendable and they treat each other as expendable, each others' jobs up for the stealing.

They all may be laid off and they are all in a panic and that's how the panic takes N. He is driven to steal other people's jobs. To malign one worker, collude with the targetting of that worker, then offer himself up for the job himself.

Enough judging. It's his karma.

But what about Marina's. How does she scrub off the mold? First thing, she has to stop spending too much time second guessing the workplace evildoings of X (the chief cannibal piranha), parsing the signals from above, blocking the kicks she's about to receive, strategizing not to kick those below (while having to stand by watching X enjoy herself kicking down). She has to put her mind on the upward trend: on real teaching and real learning, on supporting the teachers. She has to spend more time on finding allies who want to subvert the official kick-them agendas (kick the students, kick the workers). She has to find allies outside, her true community of subversive educators. She has to stop mentally hanging out with the colluders, and stop making the internalized oppressors the main focus of her thoughts.

She has to remember she too is powerful, an expert, authoritative. Acknowledge, take in, know...

How to face N? As if he were her counseling client, it's just distress? Or her workplace adversary who must be minimally interrupted, maximally exposed and stopped?

She is poor at confrontation. In those moments she forgets what she knows.