by Naomi Perley
School in New York may have started a month ago, but here in Bristol students are enjoying their last week of summer vacation. For me, however, the break has hardly been restful. Terrified after spending a week sitting at my desk, staring into the double abyss of working on my dissertation and unemployment with no end in sight, I decided to take a leap into the real world: I marched into an employment agency, resume in hand, and refused to leave until someone looked at it. I was told by one of the recruiters to come back the next morning, so I could take some tests and we could “have a chat.”
I was shocked to discover the next day that some of the skills I have honed through years of toiling in academia might actually be seen as desirable by a non-academic employer. When the recruiter and I sat down for our “chat,” she started by telling me that I had received a score of 87 percent on the Microsoft Word intermediate-level test, which she said was pretty good. But she seemed particularly impressed by my typing: “Not only do you type at a speed of seventy-six words per minute,” she gushed, “but you have a 99 percent accuracy rate. Where on earth did you learn to type so well?”
At last, my twin careers as a pianist and a musicologist were finding their perfect union. My manual dexterity from years of toiling at the piano had combined with endless late nights writing twenty-page papers and a hypersensitivity to typos (worsened by three years of grading Hunter College undergraduates’ work) to give me a certifiably employable skill: typing quickly and accurately. Needless to say, within about three hours of leaving the agency, they had lined up two weeks’ worth of work for me.
I spent my first couple of days doing some filing for a small company whose day-to-day approach to filing seemed to be “throw all papers and folders on top of the filing cabinet, wait till the piles become teetering safety hazards, then hire a temp to come and sort it all out.” Then came a considerably more stimulating role filling in as a receptionist at an upscale accounting firm: answering phones, dealing with the mail, organizing meetings, typing up illegible meeting notes. That gig culminated in a day when I was left alone in the office to fend for myself; it all went alright until ten minutes before the mail was to be collected, which is precisely when the postage machine decided that its toner cartridge had expired (who knew that ink goes bad?). As I raced to locate the spare cartridge and then figure out why the machine didn’t want to accept it, my mind flashed back to days at the GC when the printer in the music students’ lounge ran out of ink precisely ten minutes before I had to hand in a paper. This week engendered flashbacks of another kind: I spent a couple of days at a nonprofit that was about to host a major conference, stuffing folders and assembling name badges for all 190 attendees.
What struck me at all of these jobs was how, in my alternate life as a PhD student and adjunct, my days were often consumed by these same mundane tasks. I never had (or expected to have) an assistant to do my dirty work for me. It was just part of the (poorly paid) job: massive amounts of photocopying, uploading students’ grades online, keeping meticulous files of students’ past work. I know that most grad students who take low-wage, non-career-track jobs soon come to hate and resent the job and/or their boss, and it motivates them to continue with the degree so they may ultimately wind up in a career that they find intellectually (and perhaps financially) rewarding. But working as a temp seems to be having the opposite effect on me so far. I find it gratifying that the people who employ me acknowledge financially that the work I’m performing is often mind-numbing and time-consuming. Instead of foisting these tasks upon some poor junior employee or “hiring” an unpaid intern to do all their filing and typing, these companies are actually willing to pay someone just to do all the boring bits. After years of having to juggle both more rewarding work (giving lectures, writing papers) and the menial chores that are academia’s moldy underbelly, I have to say it feels nice to be paid just to do the menial chores, within the dedicated framework of a 9-to-5.
That being said, I’m not exactly free to drink myself silly as soon as the clock strikes five. I am still a grad student, and I still have that pesky dissertation to work on, however remote the GC may sometimes seem from a working lady’s life in Bristol. In one of my more extreme acts of sacrifice in the name of academia, I spent a recent Friday night participating in the GC musicology department’s dissertation group via Skype. When the meeting began at 4:30 in the afternoon, New York time, my advisor asked what time it was in Bristol. “It’s 9:30,” I mumbled sheepishly. “You hear that, everyone?” she said to the room, “that’s dedication! Spending her Friday night at the dissertation group meeting!” I didn’t tell her that I’d been looking forward to the meeting all week—to hearing the voices of my fellow students, to partaking in some real musicological discussion, even to seeing the ugly, windowless dissertation room in the background.
On the bright side, working in different offices around Bristol, I am finally getting to spend a lot of time with the natives. I think I’m starting to understand their ways a little better, but I still make plenty of gaffes. When I was working as a receptionist, one of the accountants came to my desk to show me some corrections she wanted me to make to a letter I had typed for her. As soon as she left, one of the other secretaries leaned over and said, “Don’t mind her, she’s not upset with you. At first I thought she had something against me, and then I realized that she talks like that to everyone. Don’t take it personally.” Apparently, by English standards, the accountant had spoken quite abruptly, even rudely, to me. But I, being an uncouth North American who probably speaks “abruptly” 90 percent of the time by English standards, didn’t notice anything wrong with her tone. And then there was the day that I asked a co-worker for a Sharpie, so I could write something on a package. She looked at me rather strangely and then asked if I wanted a pair of scissors. “No,” I replied, “I meant a marker . . . a permanent marker . . . don’t you call them Sharpies?” It turns out that they do not.
However much I seem to fixate on the different customs and dialects I’ve come across, it comforts me to know that the English people I encounter seem to be just as curious about me. Every time I go meet someone new, I try to guess how long it will take before their sheer curiosity overtakes their English politeness and they start trying to figure out where I’m from. Sometimes the two characteristics merge, to quite comedic effect. One morning at work, an elderly woman phoned in several times, trying to sort out why she had not yet received a cheque we had mailed out to her only a couple of days previously. By early afternoon, she called to say that, lo and behold, the cheque had arrived. In an admittedly better mood than during her earlier calls, she started to tell me how much she preferred the American mail system: “It’s so smart, how the Americans have those postboxes with the little red flags, which the postmen flip up when they’ve left some mail.” I told her it was very smart, indeed. Somewhat hesitantly, she asked, “Are you American, dear?” “No,” I replied, “I’m Canadian, actually.” In true English style, she changed her tack immediately. “Well, you know, my dear, I thought so. The Canadian accent, if you don’t mind me saying, is softer, more intellectual than the American accent.”
More happily still, the start of September, besides signaling some sort of existential wake-up call to me, also heralded the start of choir season. I am now a proud member of the Bristol Chamber Choir, formerly known as the Bristol Madrigal Society—a smallish choir with a 175-year history. Halfway through each rehearsal, we break for tea and biscuits (cost: 40p, in the jar, please). As the choir has done for the past 175 years, we finish each rehearsal by singing “The Waits,” a very English madrigal that features lots of fa-la-las. This past week, I showed up to rehearsal a few minutes early to have my official choir audition. It consisted of singing a couple of scales, and singing back some pitches that the conductor played on the piano—one of the easier auditions of my life. After it was over, the director shrugged and said, “Well, carry on, then,” which I suppose was his understated, English way of saying “welcome to the club.”
