The ACPHS Kiada

After I was forced out of my job at SUNY Oneonta due to the fact that I was only offered one course with typical adjunct level paltry remuneration and no health insurance, I decided to retire with my New York State pension and health care benefits. After retiring I applied for several jobs in the Albany area where I live. I was offered two and was turned down for two for reasons beyond me. The one I took was a job as a library assistant at the Library of the Albany College of Pharmacy.

I had high hopes for this job when I took it. I had worked as Assistant Acquisition Librarian at the Science/Engineering Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas in the 1980s. I loved that job and on many subsequent occasions I found myself wishing that I had never left it to go back to graduate school. I expected the library job at ACPHS to be similar to the one I had at SMU and that I would love it as much as I loved the one at SMU.

It turned out, however, that was I wrong. It quickly became evident that the administrative bureaucracy at ACPHS thought of its staff as basically akin to and kin of high school students. The first inkling I got of the real nature of the ACPHS administrative bureaucracy involved the six mandatory “training courses” staff were required to take. All of these courses were rather like the average American high school classes I took as a kid. Some of them took over an hour to do. One consisted of eleven modules (much more substantial in time demanded compared to any I had to do at SUNY Oneonta). I buckled down on these “courses” and finished them all, including the latest in the long line of harassment courses I have taken over my work life, within a month or so despite technical issues with the computer I was using and buffering on the last of the eight modules of the harassment “course”. I sent my many newly acquired e-certifications, which were good for a year, to the relevant bureaucrat to confirm that I had taken and completed the “courses” and was glad to be back to doing the library work I wanted to do when I took the job.

Freedom from required ACPHS courses didn't, however, last long. In November, only two months after I finished the mandatory harassment course, I was informed by the bureaucrats that I had to take it again even though I had passed it two months before with a 98.5. When I asked why I got the standard circular bureaucratic version of the parental reply to a child’s question, because we say you have to. By the way, SUNY Oneonta wisely, if I recall, waited until the middle of the spring semester to get everyone on the same bureaucratic time-table track.

As you can imagine I wasn’t very happy with this. Why not simply count my successful completion of the course and have me take it again within a month or two at the same time in a year after the certification expired, I wondered? And then I remembered that bureaucracy with its one size fits all mentality works on their schedule and wants everybody else to work on their schedule. I tried to do the “class” a couple of times but I had problems each time I attempted do it. I was able to watch one or two of the module videos and do one or two of the quizzes before I experienced that bane of the computer user, the eternal buffering circle. The first time I tried to do the course I got stuck on the second module of the “course”. The second time I got stuck on on the third. It appears that while I can watch Call the Midwife, Grantchester, and David Hurwitz on my computer with no problems, I apparently can’t watch the eight modules of the EAP Quiz Show version of New York State Harassment training produced by a private firm that feeds off of government and corporate monies and seems to not be ready for prime cyberspace time. As an aside, I actually preferred the EAP harassment “course” compared to the ones I took at SUNY Oneonta, which were made for business corporations; Veblen, I am sure, would have something a field day with that.

Anyway, long story short, I resigned. I probably would have slogged through this bureaucratic stuff if one of my colleagues hadn’t tested positive for Covid in the second week of November as I do live pretty close to the financial edge in retirement. I just could not continue to work in a workplace that put my physical health at risk. Nor could I continue to work in a workplace that treated me like a high school student to be kept in conformist line. I spent far too many years having to deal with bureaucratic mandates from on authoritarian high before I retired. Nor was working at ACPHS, with its bureaucratic annoyances some of them petty, conducive to my peace of mind. It seemed to me that the bureaucrats seemed more concerned that I take the harassment training “class” again, and harassing me to do so, than with the fact that I was put in harms way by a Covid incident in the library. In the end, I had to think of my well-being so resigning seemed the only rational and viable option for me.

Postscript: I learned after raising the resignation issue with my boss that the bureaucrats notified her that I had passed the harassment “course”. What happened, I think, was that because my September scores were locked into my EAP account and I could not override them, EAP assumed, and presumably passed on to the ACPHS bureaucrats, my September scores assuming that they were my November scores. Marvel at that. Marvel at my simulated passing of quizzes I had not taken. Welcome to the rabbit hole.