Whither Your Reporter?

In Russia, all roads may lead to Moscow. But at the moment, all roads forward in my life seem to lead from there.

For three months now, I have been trying to get the head of my school to sit down with me and discuss seriously the renewal or extension of my contract. In November, he brushed me off, saying it was far too early to be dealing with the matter (he was more than likely right). In December, he was too preoccupied with the current financial crisis and told me to come back in January. But January at last rolled round, and this week, the meeting finally came.

At present, he told me, he could commit to my contract only through the end of June. This was not because of any deficiency in my teaching but because of the current economic climate, which made it impossible to make any longer-term promises. More experienced teachers than I have been told the same thing.

There is some possibility of my having full employment here over the summer, but if I were to stay, I might have to accept working on a pro rata basis. Essentially, this would mean the company would provide me with accomodation and would pay me on a per-hour basis, not a standard monthly salary as at present.

Whether or not this puts me in a quandary is something of a pickle. Having my plans currently up in the air makes it hard to assess the situation completely. I may be heading back to graduate school in the autumn, and if so, the end of June might not be such a horrible time to leave Russia. Most likely, I would spend the summer on the East Coast, taking a short-term sublet in New York or Philadelphia and using the time to find more permanent housing for my graduate career, and possibly to travel along the East Coast of the United States.

I have long had fantasies of taking Dinah Shore's advice and seeing the USA in a Chevrolet (preferably a two-tone Bel Air convertible with white walls). Or at least, of seeing the East Coast of the USA in a series of bus trips. My aim in these travels, besides seeing more of my own country, would be to get some sense of where I might like to live--to find out whether there are places other than Brooklyn where I have a strong chance of having a contented existence. I suspect strongly there are; Brooklyn does not have a monopoly on nice neighborhoods of stately old row houses, and it would be nice to get a real feel for Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and maybe even Washington. When I was in New York, I always fancied myself too poor to venture out on such an excursion, and I now regret not having taken it. Had I done so, perhaps I would have been happier.

Other possibilities exist, however. Before coming home to America, I might take some time and see Vilnius. Contradictory stories exist about how exactly our family came to be the Wilheims, but at least one of them is that the name means "home on the Vilnius River". Indeed, I feel hard-pressed to find a good reason not to go to Vilnius, while I am over here--though as usual, my feelings about money cloud my judgment. Only 20 hours of train travel now separate me from my ancestral homeland, and it would be a great pity indeed not to bridge that gap at some point. Summer might be the ideal time to go.

If I am not destined for graduate school in the autumn, however, the possibility of moving on from Moscow also seems great. A friend and former colleague at my school is now, apparently, considering a short-term teaching stint in Japan. I have frequently seen advertisements for the program to which she is applying advertised on EFL teaching boards, and the thought has crossed my mind that this might be a good situation for me as well. The work is largely in universities, has more regular hours than my current position, and would offer, I think, the chance to save money at a good clip before entering graduate school the following fall.

Naturally, money factors into these considerations. This week, I was delighted to realize that, once I remit some money back home at the end of the month, I shall have under me almost exactly as much money as I had when I came to Russia. That might not seem like much of an accomplishment for eight months of work, but it does reflect a fair amount of sacrifice in time and effort. Additionally, I have managed to reduce my credit card debt by nearly a third in that time, and would have earned an actual profit on my time here had it not been for my trip to St. Petersburg, my computer problems last month, and a couple of other minor financial mishaps along the way. And then there is the knowledge that whatever I manage to remit home over the next five months will be pure profit.

So if travelling lies in my future, I feel I have the resources for it. Whither your reporter? God only knows. But it bodes to be somewhere interesting.

Going Postal

One things that happens when you go into teaching is that you end up hearing a lot of jokes about having summers off. In language schools, this of course does not happen (although I will be the first to admit that our workload is considerably reduced during the summer); reports I have received from people have taught in regular public and private schools indicate that it doesn't either--summer being the time when teachers work at improving their credentials, preparing or revamping lesson plans for the fall, attending educational seminars, or engaging in summer-school teaching or house painting to earn a few extra dollars.

But I will say that vacation time can be plentiful in the TEFL field. Our school has been in vacation mode since the 22nd of December and does not return to its normal schedule until this coming Sunday (yes, you read that right--Sunday...in Russia, Sunday occasionally becomes a make-up day for a weekday holiday, in this case Orthodox Christmas). And so I have had some free time on my hands.

What have I done with it? In one sense, not a lot. The weather having turned to somewhere between frigid and freezing, I have been reluctant to go out. Many days I have simply run out for food, then returned home to use my Internet connection and watch videos all day. Recently, a class of mine got into a discussion about whether people who don't possess a television set, but watch videos online, can really claim to be "living without TV." At the moment, I might be Exhibit 1 in that debate.

But in another sense, I've accomplished some very important things. My New Year's present to myself was to get the clothing pile on my bedroom floor down to zero. And close to zero it has remained. I think that, from now on, if I can manage to do just a couple loads of wash every other day, the Pile will not reconstruct itself.

More importantly, though, I've been a busy little beaver working away on graduate school applications. Two important ones, to education programs at Penn and NYU, are complete. Or will be as soon as the schools have received my transcripts. Making this possible has required my sending a $72 (Seventy-Two Dollars!) DHL package to dear old Alma Mater, because Alma Mater's registrar huffily informed me that it could not release my transcripts to anyone without an original, signed transcript request from me.

Getting this sent out required a bit of a goose chase. A fellow teacher who stayed in Moscow over the holidays took me to a post office where he had managed to send EMS (express mail) packages in the past. When we arrived, however, the granny behind the desk informed us that this police office no longer handled EMS as of the 1st of January, and told me to go to the Central Telegraph Office. Yes, you read that right. In large swatches of Russia, the telegraph is still a viable means of communication. And so off to Central Telegraph I went.

Central Telegraph lies on Tver Street, one of Moscow's main drags. The building itself features a globe above the front door that shows telegraph line radiating out from Moscow. Though I mentioned above that telegraphy is still practiced in Russia, it is no longer the main purpose of the Central Telegraph Building. Where rows of telegraphers once kept the nation's communication lines going, shoppers now hunt for bargains. All that is really left of the old telegraph operations is the city's "main" post office--now indistinguishable from any other post office in the city. It is tucked away in a corner near the entrance, rather like a duchess trying to avoid offending the paying guests who have now taken over her castle.

Into the old duchess went I, documents in hand. Tidy lines had formed at the couple of windows that appeared to be open--one marked "Telegrams" and the other marked, as near as I could guess, "Stamps." I decided to join the "Stamps" line, figuring it nearer reflected my purpose than "Telegrams." In America, it's voice mail trees that never quite correspond to your need; in Russia, it's lines.

I no sooner got to the end of the line and inquired about sending an express when someone informed me, in good English, that no express mail would be going out until the 11th, because of the New Years' and Christmas holidays. This was too late for me; even an "express" to America takes a minimum of 7 days, as I know from prior experience. And given Columbia's general apathy about handling even something as simple as a transcript request promptly, I decided to seek out DHL. On an ordinary day, I could have sent a DHL from the Central Telegraph post office, but the window was closed. I asked when it would be open again. Not until the 11th, I was told. But someone did kindly give me a list of other DHL offices around the city and pointed out the one closest to Central Telegraph. I thanked him profusely and headed out into the cold to find it.

The address for the DHL office turned out to be a Marriott Hotel. The guard at the door did not initially understand what I wanted. I was wearing tatty jeans and the kind of black wool hat that a New Yorker would most identify with muggers, hardly the attire of the Marriott's usual guests. But the guard did at least allow me to go in and speak to a receptionist who spoke English. He told me to go upstairs to the hotel's Business Center.

There, I was at last able to get my documents sent. They will leave Moscow on the 8th, the day after Orthodox Christmas, and arrive in New York the following day. My transcripts will certainly be dispatched to NYU by its deadline on the 1st of February. What an age we live in--to get a transcript from 116th and Broadway down to the Village only takes four days and a lot of running around Moscow.

This adventure aside, however, I am happy to have a real feeling of progress in my life. My graduate applications have gone remarkably smoothly. Through the online systems at Penn and NYU, I can be sure that the people writing recommendations for me have actually submitted them--something I never could have found out in pre-internet times. I can look with real satisfaction at having actually done something to find an appropriate direction for myself in life and to take the steps that will get me there.

My transcript request has gone postal. I, however, no longer am.

A Job Hunter's Bill of Rights

As a corollary to my last post, about the idiotic things that get said to you when you have the misfortune of being a job hunter, I feel it is time job hunters formed a union. If employers and other well-meaning and "well-meaning" people are going to insist that job hunting be treated as full-time job, I think job hunters should unionize and insist on better conditions within that job. Here is my modest proposal for a Bill of Rights job hunters should demand:

1) Job Hunters Have the Right to Have Their Resumes Read. By an Actual Person.

One of the most unbelievable aspects of modern job hunting is the emphasis on putting exact keywords into a resume or cover letter, for the reason that, if it does not contain these exact keywords, your resume or cover letter will not be found by the software employers use to find online resumes.

It's hard to think of anything more impersonal and depersonalized than this. We as job hunters are expected to put major amounts of time, thought, and effort into our job hunts. The least employers can do in return is read the resumes and cover letters that come in.

If we are prepared, potentially, to give years of our lives to your company, the least we can expect in return is that you take the time actually to read the resumes that come floating through your e-mail. If doing do requires hiring additional staff in your HR department, so be it.

2) Job Hunters Have the Right to Expect That Employers Will Prepare for Job Interviews and Least as Much as Interviewees.

I cannot count the number of times I have diligently gone through a prospective employer's website and learned all I could about that employer, only to come in and be interviewed by someone who had clearly not taken fifteen seconds to read my resume. The worst instance of this occurred one time when I was interviewed at an office of Merrill Lynch in New Jersey. The first question I was asked was whether I had any accounting experience. Um...no. If I'd had, it would have been on my resume. It turned out I had been brought in for this interview on the basis of my cover letter alone, and the interviewers had not bothered to check my resume to see if I had any qualifications for the position. Three hours of my life was wasted by this experience.

3) Job Hunters Have the Right to the Same Basic Courtesy as Other Human Beings.

First and foremost, this includes the right not to be asked inappropriately personal questions. While I have never been asked any question in a job interview that might be considered discriminatory and therefore illegal, I have been asked all kinds of questions about my personal dreams and aspirations that have nothing to do with my quaifications for the job in question.

It also covers such matters as not having employment decisions based on whether we accept water or tea during an interview, whether we need to use the toilet during the interview process (by this I do no advocate leaving an interview to go to the toilet...only that job hunters have the right to stop and use the toilet between meeting with different people), or whether our necktie happens to be a "rep tie" or some other kind of conservative pattern.

4) Job Hunters Have the Right to Expect Employers to Know the Difference Between Job Interviews and Counselling Sessions.

I remember distinctly an interview I had at a small public relations firm in New York. After being asked about my hobbies, I replied that I like to watch films and read. In fact, I have no real hobbies, but I needed to answer something.

The interviewer decided to give me a long line of advice about how I should go to Hollywood and work at getting a screenplay turned into a film. I tried to be as polite as possible, but a line had clearly been crossed. I think I quoted Doctor Zhivago at him, and told him that writing was no more a profession than good health.

Job interviewers, you are not our shrinks. Act accordingly.

5) Interviews for Jobs Should Not Be Cancelled Unless the Job Itself Disappears.

Even if employers think they have found the perfect candidate, they have an obligation actually to meet with every person they have invited in for an interview. Every candidate should have an equal opportunity to make his or her pitch. There is nothing more dispiriting than being uninvited for a job interview you have previously been invited for.

6) "Bait and Switch" is Under No Circumstances an Acceptable Interview Tactic.

Job hunters have the right to know what position they are interviewing for and, upon arrival at the interview, to be interviewed for that position, not another one.

Similarly, job hunters have the right to be told honestly whether they are coming in to interview for a position that actually exists or for a more general, informational interview. If you want us to come in for an informational interview, we are glad to do that. But don't pull a "bait and switch" on us.