If you want to eat, you've got to earn a bob

[sovay]

Dear internet, talk to me about jobs.

Please note that this post is not a request for money or offers of employment. The situation which I'm reviewing is the fact that my Nokia job is not sufficient income for half a household. I could afford last year's six-month apartment with adrian_turtle partly because it was a smaller place and partly because I had built up savings. It is in the nature of savings to be finite. As things stand now, we are secure only if derspatchel remains responsible for two-thirds of the rent and similar expenses, which is really not a long-term option. I had been meaning to ask for advice on this front at the beginning of the year, but the beginning of the year was rather more medical than planned—it took until this past week to feel that we were starting to stabilize again after the whole exciting bone-break experience—and now some developments have made the question particularly acute.

I have pretty much no fucking idea how to find a more than part-time job with my scattershot qualifications and physical limitations. I am aware that I am almost certainly overestimating the degree to which I am unemployable: I have two master's degrees and I'm very good with the written word, even if my resume displays almost as impressive a break after 2006 as Rob's ankle in January. I also have several chronic health issues: I fail to sleep on a regular basis: I have real reservations about any kind of work that requires me to be on my feet a lot of the time or holding down a fixed schedule. The Nokia job is great because it's work-from-home and doesn't care what hours I work so long as it's the same number every week, but it does not suffice. I have been recommended teaching and I worry about my stamina. I have been recommended editing and I don't know that my previous experience is professional enough. I'm sure there must be other options that are not retail, but I don't know where to start looking. I mean that almost literally.

And I know the economy is garbage right now, as it pretty much has been ever since I needed a job rather than a graduate student's stipend, but there must be something I haven't thought of. Hence leaving this post unlocked. I am trying to cast as wide a net of other people's opinions as possible. I will try not to bristle if you suggest things I have already thought of, or know for one reason or another will not actually work. Telling me that you would set me up for life as a writer if only you had the resources, however, is probably not very helpful to me.

(We will return to your regularly scheduled reportage of New York City sometime after I have slept and this migraine-like headache has stopped flickering at me. I am very pleased with how my portion of the reading went. It was cool to hear rinue perform and meet marlowe1 in person again now that his hair has changed color. Someone asked me to sign their copy of King David and the Spiders from Mars afterward and I had not been expecting that. There was currywurst. Definitely worth the trip.)

Comments

[weirdquark]

Tutoring was my first thought as well.

As far as library jobs go, there are jobs in libraries that don't require you to have a library degree and some of them may find Latin or Greek useful. However they'd almost certainly want you to work a set schedule, especially while you're in training, and you'd also be competing with all of the library school students. I did have one job where after I was trained said that as long as I worked a fixed number of hours a week could get them in however I liked while the building was open, so some jobs might be flexible enough for you and might be worth looking into, but it's not something you'll be able to count on. I don't have any experience with museum work, but I suspect it's similar.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

One thing that doesn't compete with the libschool folks: cataloguing in a locally uncommon language. Near me, not only grad students but the occasional undergrad who is competent reading a language for which current staff support fails to suffice have been hired to do part-time copy cataloguing. If they could find non-students (i.e., individuals with the knowledge and without the habit of leaving once their degrees are finished), they'd hire them as part-time contractors.

In sovay's neighborhood the scarcity issues may be less dire (more colleges, and colleges draw a wide variety of individuals), but then, there are also more libraries around....

[weirdquark]

Yeah, this is where a knowledge of Greek would come in handy more than Latin, because Latin is more commonly known and uses the same alphabet that English does, so it's easier for catalogers to deal with even if they don't know the language.

Though for copy cataloging transliteration charts for Greek work reasonably well, unlike, say, with Hebrew, which often lacks vowels. I've successfully copy cataloged books in Greek. With Hebrew, I can only match consonants. (I can copy catalog Hebrew, albeit painfully slowly, if it has vowels (which kids books do and not much else) and doesn't require me to create subject headings.) Arabic would be a super useful language to know and most of the people who study it aren't doing library work; I worked on a project that had a bunch of Arabic language material and no one knew Arabic (I assume I got the job because I knew how to catalog and no Arabic-proficient person applied.) and I utterly failed to match up anything on the transliteration charts with what was on the page in a way that let me find records so yeah, we didn't finish the Arabic materials.

[sovay]

so yeah, we didn't finish the Arabic materials.

Unfortunately, I don't know Arabic, and I read Yiddish better than Hebrew. I can offer rock-solid Greek, though. (And Akkadian, although cuneiform in the stacks would really surprise me.) Do you have any idea where I would start looking, if I were to throw my hat into the ring for a library?

[weirdquark]

I would usually look here, when I didn't have a particular place in mind, and actually, a quick search (limiting to part-time) turns up a part time job at the rare books library at Harvard wanting someone to update Wikipedia pages on topics relevant to Houghton collections, which could be right up your alley. It's a three month term position, but it would get you library experience, and it looks like you can work any schedule while they're open. At Houghton!

[sovay]

a part time job at the rare books library at Harvard wanting someone to update Wikipedia pages on topics relevant to Houghton collections, which could be right up your alley.

Dammit, that job wants a fusion of derspatchel and me—I am not a registered Wikipedian in good standing or otherwise, but I'd love to work with early modern books and manuscripts! I wonder if it would be legitimate for the both of us to apply.

[weirdquark]

If derspatchel is a registered Wikipedian and would be willing to let you use his account you could ask Houghton if access to someone else's account would be sufficient or if it needs to be in your name since you're doing the job. There could be reasons that wouldn't work, and if there are applicants with Wiki accounts than they'd probably get priority, but it would be worth checking.

[selidor]

If you want any pointers on all things Wikipedia, I used to edit there extensively (only stopped because it started feeling too much like, er, my day job, ironically enough) and would be happy to walk you through things.

And getting a Wikipedia account is the work of thirty seconds, becoming one in good standing a matter of ten edits to fix punctuation. Building community recognition as a person who knows what they're doing can be done by as little as producing quality work on a single article.

[sovay]

And getting a Wikipedia account is the work of thirty seconds, becoming one in good standing a matter of ten edits to fix punctuation. Building community recognition as a person who knows what they're doing can be done by as little as producing quality work on a single article.

This is useful to know. I am afraid that by the time I have set up an account and messed around on some articles that require fixing, I'll have lost the window to apply for this particular job; but since it hadn't occurred to me that having a Wikipedia account could be a marketable skill, I am thinking I might as well try it anyway.

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

I would bet good money you could learn Arabic, at least well enough to recognize characters and pattern-match words against a database.

[sovay]

I would bet good money you could learn Arabic, at least well enough to recognize characters and pattern-match words against a database.

I'm actually not going to argue with you. I knew Tiny Wittgenstein had to bottom out somewhere.

[sovay]

In sovay's neighborhood the scarcity issues may be less dire (more colleges, and colleges draw a wide variety of individuals), but then, there are also more libraries around....

I had assumed libraries were off limits without a degree, so this is actually useful to hear. Thank you.