True Misery

This post appeared yesterday in The World’s Greatest Blog. 

An adjunct professor identifying herself as Neala Healy laments her situation.  It’s not the most pleasant reading, but it resonated with me in a way few other commentaries on our profession have in a very long time.

It’s good to know, even in some small way, even from a complete stranger, that I am not alone.

Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella

Take-out chain Pret à Manger’s workplace social engineering program is back in the news.

An article in the London Review of Books describes in detail how Pret enforces customer-friendly behavior on the part of its employees through in-store micromanagement and occasional visits by mystery shoppers.  The overarching idea is to inculcate an attitude in service workers at odds with their subjective state. 

Of course, all jobs require us to present a calculated, inauthentic persona to the people we meet; sociologist Erving Goffman pointed this up in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Even the most technically skilled positions entail a certain degree of playacting when dealing with others. 

However, service sector work conditions in recent years reflect the worst aspects of neoliberal capitalism.  The widening wealth gap seems to be heralding the advent of a new Gilded Age in which society consists of a small plutocratic class and a somewhat larger set of the merely rich on the one hand, and a large, financially insecure mass of servile contingent workers on the other.  Between these two poles is an ever-shrinking demographic customarily referred to in American cant as the “middle class.”[1]  Under such conditions obsequiousness has become a survival strategy for the masses lest they be made to suffer further.

What does all this mean for me, then, as a customer who swings by Pret on a business-day afternoon to grab a quick to-go lunch?  Do I want prompt, efficient service?  Of course.  Do I wish to be treated rudely or indifferently?  Certainly not.    But neither do I want insincere, overweening friendliness, particularly when I know that failure to display such behavior might lead to a loss of livelihood. 

That there is a happy medium to be achieved is beside the point.  The capitalist class must keep workers firmly in place.  And the surest means of doing so is to systematically deny each of them their very humanity.  Corporations like Pret à Manger are refining this process to near-science.  Whether we choose to believe so or not, we are all the poorer for the practice.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] That most of this population segment is made up of salaried and wage workers who themselves teeter on the brink of economic disaster is a truth most of us avoid thinking about.

Professor Scholar's Responses to Common Student Questions and Excuses

Please read the syllabus.

I’m sorry you are unwell and can’t make it to class.  Feel better.

No, I don't have a stapler.

You don't know when the research paper is due?  Check the announcements section on the LMS.  Or consult your syllabus.

Did you miss anything while you were out last week?  No, I don't think so.  We held a moment of silence to mourn your absence, and then I wasted time for the next three hours.  Just like I always do.

Your grandmother passed away last night?  I'm very sorry for your...Wait a minute.  Didn't your grandmother die the second week of class?

When's the exam?  I don't remember offhand.  Check the syllabus.

Yes, we are having class Thanksgiving week.

You're going to Acapulco next week for a much needed vacation?  That's great, but we're still having the exam.  No, you can't make it up.

No, I don't have a stapler.  Didn't you hear what I said to the student in front of you?

So, you say the Dean is a family friend, huh?  Perhaps she should be more discriminating about who she associates with.

Your family is coming in early for the holidays and you have to miss class.  Not my problem.

I'm quite aware that your mom / dad / significant other / dog thinks you're special.  I happen to think you're a lazy, entitled oxygen thief and a waste of a valuable classroom seat.

Do I have a stapler?  What do I look like, that Milton guy in Office Space?

If you think I'm mean and unfair, just wait until you have a boss.

No, I don't have a goddamn stapler!

Because fuck you, that's why!

 © 2014 The Unassuming Scholar

The Miz Resurrected

Oh happy day!  The World’s Greatest Blog has returned.  College Misery, dark since February, has resumed blessing us with proffie tales of classroom contretemps, bratty students, and self-interested administrators.  I’m excited that an old friend is back in town.

As before, you can read the latest posts on this site’s blogroll…

California über Alles

Behold, a curious item from The Baffler by Corey Pein: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/

If you need still another reason to distrust Silicon Valley technogurus and the world they seek to impose, here it is…

Franz Ferdinand, RIP

On this day in 1914, young Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on a Sarajevo street, ushering in the twentieth century nightmare from which we have yet to awaken.

I'm Still Here...

See above.