A Day's Work

My Office

I am everywhere.

In the new student center, clogs off, black almost grey socks showing, my feet probably stink, I forgot to put deodorant on yesterday but didn’t realize my BO until I was teaching my fourth class on my third campus of the day. Check email, answer one, two, three, four students from one, two, three different schools.

The only reason I decided to teach a course here is because you pay me 500 dollars more per class. That’s a deal! Drop out of one community college, begin patronage to next. I am proud to be an American: where at least I know I can get a Master’s degree and still have part time jobs with no health insurance or benefits.

First in order: get a new faculty ID. Second: get fourth email address. Third: say hi to students and remember all their names. The only people who venture to say hi to me in the halls, center, libraries, are my accumulated 247 students.

The only benefit of being an adjunct is getting free membership into the upstairs enclave, insert Athletic Club, where I am around sweaty students and full time faculty, equally as financially secure because of their pensions or their parents.

I am attached to my body through my dorky briefcase (that I purchased at Walmart for a whopping 40 bucks) the wheel is worn down to ½ an inch stub and all my students know it’s me by the rattling of my briefcase rolling down the halls.

Set up camp, pull out laptop, find outlet, find pen amidst stolen dry erase markers in purse, student calls with unknown number because I only have my cell number to give them. I don’t answer it. I pull out recent papers in my makeshift filing system and place on coffee table. Welcome to My Office.

Warning: your students may have better cars than you do. Warning: your students may have better salaries than you do. This was actually written in one of my 10 adjunct faculty handbooks.

I am nowhere.

No office, on my syllabus my office location is unlisted because it doesn’t exist.

No desktop computer that’s plugged into a permanent wall in a permanent outlet where permanent people go to their permanent jobs and ferment in their permanent chairs that are specially crafted for their backs from a special office chair furniture store’s catalog.

Listing 15 supervisors for one university in one semester on my resume isn’t my idea of permanence, Miss. Worried future employer’s look at my resume with suspicion. My supervisors say: I wish you could take on more courses next semester, but we may drop them due to low levels of student enrollment, or give them rather to full time faculty that need five courses per semester. I am only allowed to teach four.

I am adjunct faculty, and I am expendable.

How many part time jobs does it take to equate to a full time one? Answer: none.

I am adjunct. Adjacent to the city we call University, Community College. The UniverCity where its citizens vote in committees, advise each other, have subordinates, students, people that mow the lawns and cut the grass and enter the data and switch the trash in the classrooms and clean up the shit in the bathrooms. All these participants in the UniverCity have more benefits than me, adjunct. Adjacent: Peeking in, just around the corner to the threshold of academic success, where I can have plants and books and more plants and grass growing greener on the other side of MY office. Welcome, full timer. You are Welcome.

Mel B Freitag, M.A. (not Ph.D.)