In which Self of Steam Deflates

This week's Sunday comic is a Doonesbury flashback.

Maybelle is Morose

After the one interview (reminder here), there was silence. Then rejections. Maybelle got a bit desperate and started applying for any kind of work.

This week, the applications to work at restaurants and waitress started. One manager said maybe. The rest said no. Apparently a PhD does not give you the appropriate skills to wait tables and learn the shorthand for a BLT no T. I guess.

The feeling of being outside the tenure track caste system is like being a starving person looking into a bakery window. I don't want the scraps and leftovers. I want a place at the table.

At this point, I would settle for any job. Any job at all.

Because Professors Get a Raise Every Time their Student Fails, Amirite?

I may have mentioned this anecdote before, probably because the logic and convoluted rationale behind such a conclusion still manages to baffle me whenever I think about it. Which I do more and more often these days, surrounded by summer students who think that:

I) they are doing ME a favour by spending their summer within echoing, freshly-painted halls

II) they are entitled to an A because they are spending their precious summer indoors, the martyrs

III) they hold some type of power over Yours Truly because they CHOSE me instead of Professor X who also teaches the same course

IV) Therefore, I should be exceedingly flattered to be gifted with their presence

V) Thus I cannot conceivably give them anything but an A out of pure, unadulterated gratitude.