Where's the Fire?

Last week, I wrote about watching "The Wizard of Oz" during a windstorm (life imitating art, right?). This week, I'm writing about traveling to a job interview during a Southern California firestorm. There was a wildfire in So Cal back in the summer, but it broke out after I left, and I was glad to escape it. I'm sure everyone was hoping the wildfire danger was passing this late in the year, but obviously it wasn't.

Most of these fires broke out either the day before or the day of my scheduled interview in L.A., and there was at least one burning as my plane was approaching the airport. I saw what looked like smoke from my window and wondered if there was indeed a fire; I couldn't smell anything downtown, though, and didn't realize how bad things were until later. Even in Santa Monica, I couldn't smell smoke that evening, and I didn't make the connection between fires and the couple of people I saw wearing masks; one was a child near a hospital and the other a woman inside a business who had one around her neck. I wondered if the flu was going around.

In fact, my interview was cancelled because of the Skirball Fire, which broke out, as I understand it, early in the morning on the day of my interview. Since I had only flown in for the interview and had only two days in town, I was unable to reschedule for the next day. That fire, in Bel Air, was the closest to where I was, but I still couldn't smell any smoke and kept looking at the sky near my hotel, which remained clear, adding to the surreal nature of the entire episode. I started to worry about smoke coming in through the heating/air conditioning unit, but it never did.

People at the hotel were almost preternaturally calm, so it was little like being in a bubble, especially when I looked at what was happening elsewhere on television. When the mayor of Los Angeles told people to be prepared to move quickly, I wondered if it was possible Santa Monica would be affected and I'd have to leave my hotel. It seemed unlikely that a wildfire would make it that far, but I don't have much experience with them.

With all the suffering and harm these fires have caused, it doesn't seem right for me to focus on how seriously inconvenienced I was, financially and time-wise, by what happened, but the truth is that I was. Once it was clear that I couldn't reschedule the interview, I was told by the person who had scheduled me that she was surprised I'd been willing to fly in from out of town for an opening that only entailed a few hours a week. That was the first I'd heard of that; I couldn't believe what I was hearing, as the email I'd gotten initially suggested that multiple shifts were available, including one that was 30 hours a week.

I went back and read the email again and wondered how I could have misunderstood so badly. I blamed myself for not asking more questions, but the truth is that the email I got said nothing about offering only three to six hours (rather, it gave the opposite impression). In my experience, part-time position announcements usually make a low number of hours clear at the outset. There are many people, even if they lived in the same town, who wouldn't bother to interview for a three-hour job. I had flown two-thirds of the way across the country for one.

Although the institution I was supposed to interview with allegedly has a good reputation, I have to wonder about the quality of library service a student gets if the librarians helping them only work a few hours a week. It takes a lot of on-the-job time to become familiar with the resources a particular institution has, and this is especially true in a generalized collection such as an academic library. When I worked as a graduate assistant in my university's library, I often wondered how effective I was at helping people because the number of resources was so vast. A patron could come in at any time and need help with a database I had zero familiarity with, and this actually happened a lot.

Fifteen hours a week of on-the-job training allowed me to scratch the surface, but that was all. If you're dealing with someone who only works three hours a week, you might as well be working with a trained monkey. Literally, if they took you in off the street and asked you to be a librarian, you would probably be nearly as effective as someone working so few hours; he would have no time to become familiar with the collection and the patrons by experiencing a lot of varied requests and repetitive database searches.

So not only was I out of pocket for expenses I couldn't really afford, I was left to feel I was silly for having bothered to come out in the first place. It seemed to me, though, that the institution was remiss for not having stated the requirements more clearly (and also for being willing to hire multiple trained monkeys to attempt to serve their patrons). None of it made any sense; I almost had the impression they were being dishonest with me in some way. As I told them, it seemed bad form to complain too much in the face of the fire situation, but having been inconvenienced in a pretty major way, I felt I should point out the desirability of their being clearer in their job descriptions in the future.

So that was how I spent two days in L.A. I can tell you it's possible to get from the airport to Santa Monica via the Metro, though it's a wearying journey, and I can tell you this isn't the first time I've felt jerked around in my job search process--far from it. If I derived any other benefit from this experience, I have no idea what it is, but I do know that I deserve far better and would likely not have enjoyed the experience of working for this college even if I had gotten the job. Initial impressions can be quite revealing.