As some of you may know I retired from part-time college and university teaching in 2021. To say I have enjoyed retirement other than my ever increasing health problems would be an understatement. I have enjoyed the freedom to be able to listen to classical music when I wanted, read when I wanted, and watch TV shows or movies when I wanted.
Recently, I have begun to think about applying for jobs again. The reason for this is simple. I know that the politically and ideologically correct wild bunch at the White House are thinking about getting rid of Medicare as we know it.
So, I applied for a job at Siena College recently which I did not get partly, I suspect, because of my longer than shoulder length hair. I saw the person who interviewed me via Zoom, actually do a double take when she saw it. I also recently applied for an online teaching job—I did online classes at SUNY Albany and SUNY Oneonta—at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and I tried to apply for one at the University System of New Hampshire.
Both Worcester Poly and the USNH actually used the same third party application system (public and private corporations enriching other private corporations). I had no problem using this system when I applied to Worcester. The application system was able to autofill my application at using my vita. I was not so lucky when it came to the University System of New Hampshire application, however.
When I learned about the job from Indeed I went to the USNH company page (academic institutions as corporations) and created an account. I told the application to fill in the blanks with my vita. Unfortunately, it proved unable to do that simple task. Why it was able to do this with my application to Worcester Poly and not able it at the USNH is beyond me and I want it to remain beyond me. Trying to understand computers is like trying to understand the human mind.
Everything went well with my USNH application until I was asked for my educational background. The system was able to fill in my name, my address, my telephone number, my email, and most of my employment background material. It was not, however, able to fill in my educational history. When I tried to put in the information manually the programme would not let me. Presumably this was because the system was too stupid to realise that since it did not put in the information and I thus had to it could not cope with the fact that I needed to do it manually when it wanted to do it automatically, or rather not done it, automatically. Life as surreal farce.
At this point I gave up. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time then to waste it (time is money) trying to do what apparently could not be done.
I went back to the USNH again today to see if I could do the impossible. I wasn’t going to try to do this manually since whether I should be considered for the job, a professional job I should add, should be done solely on the basis of my vita since I am not applying for a job at McDonalds. I forgot my password so I tried to get a new one. When I requested a line to create a new password the link the USNH sent me arrived without a link I could actually click on.
The moral of this story? Computer associated systems used for applications can be utterly stupid on occasion. Perhaps this is because of the literalism associated with this stuff, perhaps it is the fact that humans create such systems, or perhaps it is because we live in a kafkaesque world. I don’t know and I don’t care to know. I will leave this theological questions up to hardshell Calvinists to try to discern.
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