Break is over

And yeah, I neither had very much fun or very much productivity on it, so poo.

I also wasted almost 1/2 hour this morning looking for a tiny piece of lab equipment I need for class today but which has gone missing. Wonder if Terrible Class of last year just chucked it out at the end of that lab. Oh, I can still DO the planned lab but it will not go as well or as smoothly, so I'm unhappy: this is a big big class and anything that throws up obstacles makes it harder for us to get done in time.

I also borrowed a bunch of glassware (which I had to wash; that's another issue: no student workers we can pay to do it and it's too much to expect the lab coordinator to do it on top of her other duties). It just feels like things are quietly falling apart behind the scenes and while we'll eventually adjust (I told my chair before spring break - when I washed up the vast majority of accumulated glassware for the intro-majors lab - that we need to make a rota so a different person winds up doing it each week, and it isn't just the agreeable people who feel guilty about it falling on the lab coordinator (like me) who wind up doing extra work)

I just don't like this New Normal where we're paid less, doing more, and there's the polite fiction of "work free" days off for which we don't get paid but that work still needs to be done. It's not the fault of anyone on my campus but I still do not like it.

Yes, in part, it is a cultural change: a colleague tells me that in Japan, in businesses, it is common for the "white collar*" (for lack of a better term) employees to do light custodial work as a keeping-'em-humble/teamwork sort of thing. And there's Berea College, where the students do labor as (at least part of) their tuition. And I really don't MIND washing glassware, I just have to figure out where in my schedule I fit it in and also I don't want to be the ONLY one having to do it.





(*I have read that "white collar" and "blue collar" don't exist so much any more. And there are few true "blue collar" jobs you can support a family on any more - not like the neighbors I grew up around who worked at (I think it was) the Ford plant or another person who was in light manufacturing. I guess I'm technically an "information worker" but we're in peril now, too: I could see robots very soon coming for our jobs; make Siri a bit more sophisticated and a bit more subject-specific and you've got a professor-replacement who can do one-on-one tutoring even better than the smallest class size. Though she wouldn't be very good at teaching lab techniques and that might be the one thing that saves my job for a few more years.


Raises the question: what do humans do when there aren't enough jobs left for all the humans? Do we go back to the land? Do we go in for increasingly precious and ridiculous "artisinal" making things, where there is a laboring class that makes stuff that the people who have money (because they invested early in computers/robots or because they designed them) buy? Does everything devolve back to barter? ("I will trade wheat for sheep"?)

Did my dad have these same questions and worries in his career?

***

I finished Sylvie Culture last night but it was too late to photograph her and I was too tired. Photos will probably come this afternoon.