Fingers Crossed for the Promotion

Not just mine, mind you, but everybody else’s. The reason for this empathy, however, may sound a bit self-interested as well.

Last April, we received the Calls for Promotion from the UP Administration. I was a member of my department’s Academic Personnel Committee (APC), and was tasked to assist the Chairman in all the promotion matters. Suddenly, my humdrum life as an APC member, which hitherto consisted mainly of watching fidgety and nervous teaching demonstrations from applicants, became a high-octane existence.

We, the members of the APC, worked at refining the guidelines for promotion, making sure that the “scholarly/creative work distinct to the unit” was added, so that our poets, playwrights, actors, and directors could have some share of the promotion pie. This task, because of some silly miscommunications and misunderstandings, probably took us nearly 100 man-hours to finish.

Then there was the task of collecting the portfolios of every interested faculty. The thing that bothered me with this part of the promotion was this: How could we be so strict with the submissions of our students (showing the height of anal-retentiveness by specifiying the font size and margins and folder color and paper type and format and all and refusing to check-or even accept-anything that strays from this format) and be so lax about rules and guidelines ourselves? I could only think of a handful of faculty members who followed the format of the portfolio. It was absurd. It got even more absurd when some faculty members actually argued that their format was “almost exactly like” the prescribed format, so can’t we just accept them to spare the teachers the work of having to reformat? It was crazy. Rules and formats and guidelines are exactly what they are–being a teacher doesn’t excuse you from them, in fact it’s your supreme responsibility to follow them, so that you could lead by example. Anyway, we chucked our anal-retention aside and took in the portfolios, but somehow that simple exercise of collecting them left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, there was the job of assigning points to the portfolios, looking for missing proofs and documentation, quadruple-checking the computations, and placing everything in the all-important matrix form. This was hands-down the most mind-numbing experience I’ve had in my career as APC member, for the simple fact that the promotion guidelines seemed written in water and open to misinterpretation. So we had to compute and recompute, and argue endlessly who got the correct interpretation of this or that guideline. Then almost daily we received emails from the Dean regarding “corrected” guidelines, so we had to go back to square one, and sometimes the work we had achieved in some of our marathon meetings (from lunch up to 9PM at one time, up to dinnertime in so many others) were scrapped.

All this work inevitably frayed our nerves. At times I seriously contemplated some form of recreation to alleviate our stress (boxing each other glove-less perhaps?). We lived, breathed, and exhaled the promotions. We were neglecting loved ones (Thealove was becoming increasingly suspicious of my “overtime”) and even ourselves. Here one piece of advice I got somewhere became very useful: never take your work home. After every marathon meeting I’d take a cold shower to wash the sweat and revitalize myself, then I would read Stephen King or The Motorcycle Diaries by Guevara to, as Wittgenstein once said, “wash the mind.”

The promotions are now out of the APC’s hands (I pray). We submitted the final matrix to the dean, including all the summaries with all the computations, remarks, and Coke Zero stains intact. 

So you see how I meant that wishing for everyone’s promotion can be self-interested. I’m not really a fan of everyone in the Department, sorry. But if somebody doesn’t get promoted, after all that brain-bleeding APC work, I’m going to be really pissed.  

Dedicated to the APC of the Department of Humanities 2007-2008 

Past Office Hours

Past Office Hours

 

I am an office rat. That is my personal slang for people who like to stay in the office, even when it’s not absolutely needed. I arrive a few minutes after Tita Daisy, our secretary, opens it in the morning, and I stay until it is open. I do this even if we don’t have a bundy clock to punch in and I can’t claim all the overtime hours I’ve logged in. I do it at the risk of being ostracized by people whose reputations I unconsciously impugn because my needless visibility contrasts with their conspicuous invisibility. But this is not for personal glory, and there is no holier-than-thou mentality behind my strange fixation with the office. It’s an addiction I can’t shake.

 

            Ever since I set foot in an office, I’ve always been attracted to them. In movies, I often am drawn to office scenes. I like office paraphernalia and furniture, such as filing cabinets and computers. I like the sound of printers at work, of phones ringing, and of papers being shuffled. I also love the lunchtime smell when everyone’s lunch aroma mixes with the cold, recycled air. Oh, I also love the free air-conditioning.

 

            My first memories of an office were of my mother’s. She worked in accounting, and when I was in early elementary I would tag along on overtime-weekends so that I could lure her into the comics store at the nearby mall and convince her that I needed that new issue of The Uncanny X-Men. Later on though, I noticed that I also went with my mother so that I could be in her office.

 

            I was fascinated with cubicles, or how three and a half short walls gave you your own personal space in such a wide, nearly depersonalized environment. I was amused at how people took off their dress shoes and wore bedroom slippers while at their desks. I smiled when I noticed that gossip and personal counseling do happen around the water dispenser, as the movies depicted.

 

            What captured my attention further, aside from the sights, sounds, smells, and textures that the office offered, was the important concept on which the physical existence of an office rests. This was a place where people worked. This was a place where adults made important decisions and earned money. People dressed differently in this place, their faces looked differently as well. All of these came to me as manifestations that the office, much like the church or the gym, was a special place. This was not a place to lounge around in; you had to have a purpose to be there, even if it was something mundane such as filing letters or taking out the trash. All this purposiveness fascinated me, but it also frightened me a bit.

 

            Unless you work in some office on the brink of foreclosure, or you simply have not understood that you have to work when you get there, time passes unnoticeably at the office. People are in a hurry, and people who aren’t are labeled and talked about derisively. People just can’t wait till the next paycheck. Cooperatives are drawn up and goods and merchandises are sold and traded during “downtimes.” People have to do something, even if it means having to gossip about one lady officemate’s surprising cosmetic makeover or how so and so is not worthy of that promotion.

 

            This is why, as I have earlier mentioned, I love cubicles. Unfortunately, I haven’t shown my own much love, but that is another essay. Anyway, cubicles offer you shelter from all the craziness (peripheral or otherwise) that offices cultivate. The conventional office desk tells you a lot about the person using it. Somebody should seriously study this. Why do people have all these family pictures under their glass tops? Is it because they need something to look at to remove their minds temporarily from the drudgery they call work? Is it to remind them the reason why swallowing one’s pride and not talking back to the obnoxious boss is of extreme importance? Or is it, as Seinfeld once suggested, because we are in constant danger of forgetting that we do have families and we might unwittingly blow our entire salary on hookers and booze on closing time?

 

            Lately I’ve been having one of those spells when I seriously contemplate on why I have this office fixation. Or, rather, my addiction to the office is temporarily waning. But, just like any office rat, I’m able to convince myself that the weekend is near. Two days away from the office, or two days spent doing something meaningful besides staring at computers and crunching numbers, will cure me and by Monday I would be itching to get back to my desk.

 

            I forgot to tell you that my work means I don’t have to be in the office every single working day. I teach, so office time takes second place to lecturing and classroom discussions. Also, we have the option not to teach in the summer, and we are allowed not to report to the office during the summer break. Some of you reading this might already be convinced what a nutter I am, and let me persuade you further. I actually look forward to the summer term because it gives me more time to stay in the office. An officemate frankly asked me if I still had a life. For a while I wanted to throw the photocopier at her. After a few more minutes I was asking myself the same thing.

 

            All this obsession with going to the office can be negative as well. If you’re always at the office, people will definitely notice your absence. You can spend days and days going to the office, doing your own personal work such as reading up on backlog lessons or typing an updated syllabus, and nobody looks for you in your little cubicle in the massive office complex. But the one freak of a day that you say to yourself “I’m not needed that much in the office today, might as well stay home so the office can save on electricity and I can watch the NBA Playoffs” is the day they need your signature for some important document or you have to report directly to the Dean for some urgent impromptu matter. Then you go to the office the following day, so guilty of your negligence that you hope somebody asks you to do something important to redeem yourself. Sometimes, this thought is enough to drive me to the office every single day. Or I could just be over-reacting. Some of my officemates have developed a sixth sense that tells them when they are needed in our office and only then do they go. I haven’t mastered it, and I envy them.

 

            Some people dread the thought of working in an office. They say it deadens their imagination, that they feel “boxed,” or it’s the corporate nightmare to their counter-culture dreams, that it “cramps their style,” and so on. I do not have a problem with their opinions. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always wanted to work in an office. I’m not a workaholic, but I finish my tasks and try to be as helpful as possible—that’s as un-self-gratifying as I can put it. But I do love the office.