When a good idea goes bad

If you are just tuning in, here's the story to date. For the past ten years, I worked for a career college at its campus in Clackamas, a city near Portland. On April 1, we received notice from management that our site would be closing at the end of the term. Students were invited to transfer to the main campus in Wilsonville. On April 9, full-time faculty were notified individually if they were being asked to transfer or if they were being laid off. Three people, all program directors, were invited to stay. The rest of us were given notice that our last day would be May 2.

For the past three weeks, in an effort to cope with my shock and grief, I documented the closing of the campus with my funky old Sony Cybershot and posted the photos on my faculty webpage.

I took pictures of packing boxes. I took pictures of people I have grown to love and admire (and avoided others). I photographed the flyer that a posse of outraged students plastered the halls with in a futile attempt to save a teacher's job. I documented the stairs our boss Denny fell down. I captured a teacher's tattoo and and another teacher's glittery flipflops. Everywhere I looked I found people that deserved to be honored, moments that needed to be acknowledged, objects that deserved to be recognized. Some images were meaningful only to me, but some of the images seemed to sum up the bittersweet last days at our special campus. It was slipping away so fast. I wanted to preserve it, for me, for us, so every day I took more pictures and expanded my webpage.

Sheryl's filing cabinet, for sale for a day to the highest bidder, now left behind.... A whiteboard decorated with a student's scribbled love notes to a teacher she would never see again.... An accounting teacher on his shiny three-wheel motorcycle.... Classrooms, stairways, hallways, the lobby, the smoking area.... The view of the empty parking lot from the third floor computer lab.... A bizarrely shaped coffee cup imprinted with a tagline so astoundingly apropos I could hardly hold the camera still for laughing: There's a better life out there.

When I look back through the photos, one thing strikes me: everyone I photographed was smiling. Big, wide smiles. There were no sad faces, no moping expressions, no defeated postures. We all looked happy, despite the fact that our lives were being turned upside down, inside out. Even I looked happy.

The last day came. I finished my grades and had Denny sign off on them. I made arrangements to have the bookkeeper mail my final paycheck. I cleaned out my desk drawers. I posted the last photos on my faculty webpage. I prepared auto-replies that would activate at midnight, stating that I was no longer with the college. I packed up my book bags with my binders, my stapler, my post-it notes, my scissors. And finally, I drafted a goodbye email.

I addressed the note to everyone in Wilsonville and Clackamas. In it I described my gratitude at having been a part of the organization for ten years and how I was certain what I learned would help me in my new career. I entitled it Happy trails from Clackamas. At the end of the note, in a postscript, I gave the URL to my faculty webpage.

I finished the letter and then sat there with my mouse poised over the SEND button.  I had a gut feeling it might not be a wise thing to do. I re-read it, trying to imagine how it would be received. Should I take off the URL to my webpage? Should I delete the letter altogether? Should I fade away quietly without a protest, without one final poke, one last prod? I wanted to say, Hey, look at us, you stupid college, look at what you did with this bonehead move, you disregarded the needs of your students, you disrespected your faculty, you destroyed your brand. You thought by cutting off our campus, you could save yourselves. You thought you were abandoning us on the part of the ship that was sinking. Ha.

I predict we will survive, we will flourish, our ship will sail on, and in the end your top-heavy boat will sink into obscurity. Because you can't treat people disrespectfully forever. Sooner or later, you will find out what happens when you sail too close to the rocks. The next thought running through my head was, What have I got to lose? What are they going to do, fire me? That made me smile. So I hit SEND and sat back to wait.

Within moments I got my first response, oddly enough from the Compliance Officer, wishing me farewell and giving me his personal email address. (“Let's link up on LinkedIn.”) I was pleasantly surprised. In another few moments, two more responses wishing me well from employees who were former students (“I learned so much from you!”), then another from the program director in Wilsonville (“I never really knew you, but good luck!”). A few minutes later, Denny came into the office, checked his email, and said, “Your link doesn't work.”

“What? No, are you sure?” I said. I quickly typed in the URL. Sure enough: Error 404: File or directory not found. We looked at each other. I turned back to the computer, opened Expression Web, and tried to load up my site. And there it was, the message, spelled out in black and white:

There is no site named http://blablablacollege.info/myname.

It was dead. My faculty website was gone. I had been well and truly spanked.

I responded the way I responded to every interesting incident at the college over the past three weeks. I got out my camera and took a picture of it. A simple image to commemorate the end of ten years of service to a for-profit career college. There's a better life out there.

Reality takes a holiday

Last night, with two days to go until I'm officially unemployed, a student looked at me and said, “You don't look so good.”

I know she was trying to offer me some sympathy for my plight. She's young, not even 21, and not all that skillful a communicator. Under normal circumstances, I would just let a comment like that slide. But now, operating on the premise that any moment can be a teaching moment, I bit back.

“You are assuming you know how I feel by looking at me,” I said. Actually, I wasn't feeling all that bad. No worse than normal anyway, and certainly not as bad as you might expect considering I'm losing my job in two days.

“Oh, sorry!” the student exclaimed. “I didn't mean...”

I almost started to explain how I have a permanent frown line between my eyebrows that makes me appear as though I'm always scowling or perhaps like I'm about to hurl. But my enthusiasm for the teaching moment deflated as fast as it had bubbled up, and I just let it go. Nobody cares how I look or how I feel. Everyone is completely preoccupied with how he or she is experiencing the closing of our campus and the prospect of what is to come.

Mella came to work with a new attitude yesterday, after a hard weekend of mourning the loss of her job. She apparently was in denial about the finality of the layoff. Now I'm wondering, maybe she really did incite students to post those flyers: Save Mella! Maybe it was a last ditch effort to manipulate the school into taking her back. When the flyer ploy failed to do anything except raise the wrath of Mr. Freeper, the awful reality became too real to ignore. She said she cried all day Sunday. But the new Mella is funnier than hell. She wasn't moping anymore. She snickered at our snarky jokes and bitter jibes and delivered some jabs of her own. If only Mr. Freeper and Ms. Sic-em could have been here to hear our futile naughtiness. Har har har.

We rebel in small ways. For example, we are dressing down. Sheryl wears denim to work now, although her version of denim is embroidered with flowers. Way to go, Sheryl, that's rebellion against the dress code! I'd love to see her in a pair of hole-riddled, dirt-encrusted Levis. (I'd wear mine if my ass wasn't too big to fit them.) Mella has a wardrobe of school-logo polo shirts in pastel colors. I'm going to encourage her to set them on fire on the smoker's patio. Maybe we can trigger the fire alarm. That would be a treat during finals week, eh?

No, not really. I like to think I'm such a rebel, such a chronic malcontent, past hope. The truth is, I fear people see me more clearly than I see myself. Maybe. Maybe not. Dave, our extroverted security guard (Oh! My! God! Carol's in the house!) said he would miss me. I think he might have felt obligated to say that due to an awkward moment when I asked him if he was looking forward to going to Wilsonville. He didn't want to appear too chipper, since he remains employed while do not, so I'm guessing he felt compelled to say something nice.

And then he experienced an escalation of commitment and said, “I'm going to miss your positive...” He trailed off, at a loss for words, maybe hoping I would fill in the blank for him, like my students do when taking tests. I just looked at him. I could have said, my positive...ly snarky attitude? My positive... ly scowling expression? I didn't. I just thanked him and moved away down the hall, so he didn't feel obligated to continue to dig up platitudes that neither one of us believed.

Look at me! What did I just say? I am assuming I know what he was feeling. Ha. (We know what happens when we assume, yada yada.) Actually, now that I think about it, knowing Dave, I could be standing over a dead body with a bloody hammer in my hand, and he would choose to believe in my innocence. That's Dave. He assumes the best. I assume the worst. Somewhere in the middle is reality, but who cares anymore?

Appearances are everything

I revised my concept paper according to the suggestions offered by my chair and resubmitted it, a process which took less than an hour. While I wait for a response, I am pondering yet another odd aspect of life—the inordinate power of appearances. That is, how things look often seems to have more impact than how things really are.

Let me give you some examples. People sometimes say I look tired. They don't ask if I am tired. They assume that I am tired based on my appearance. (In most cases, they would be correct.) Here's a better example. People often say I look angry. Because I am a chronic malcontent, over the years my bad attitude has carved a deep fissure between my eyebrows. You know how some people have laugh lines? Not me. I have a permanent scowl. My former significant other called it stinkeye, just one of the reasons we are no longer a couple. This vertical groove is present whether I am happy or sad, angry or elated. It is now a permanent topological feature on the landscape of my face. Only cosmetic surgery will make me appear happy.

But that is what I mean. It's just an appearance. On the surface I may look angry, but inside I may be happy. Well, if not happy, at least neutral. But you will never know if you don't ask.

In my family, success was closely tied to appearances. No one cared how you felt. It only mattered how you looked. If you looked good, then you were good. So simple, yet so destructive. My father wanted me to look like a girl. "Why don't you wear some of those nice Ship and Shore outfits," he asked me once. Now I know he just wanted me to be happy, and the path to happiness was to look good. At the time I interpreted his request as a demand for me to be someone else, some perfectly attired, traditionally coiffed creature that I could never be.

I spent a lot of time trying to look good. When that didn't make me feel good, I moved to Los Angeles and started wearing the most bizarre outfits I could create on my little Singer 503A. Think shiny black vinyl capes over jumpsuits with padded shoulders the size of small turkeys. Picture pale Oregon skin, spiked hennaed hair, and black-burgundy lipstick. Since then, anytime I feel like I'm losing my sense of self, I shave my head. It's my way of reclaiming my identity.

I have a co-worker I will call Sheryl. She and I are often mistaken for one another. Because I had a sister, I know what it feels like to be mistaken for another. I'm used to it. When students call out for help, I answer to Carol, Sheryl, and everything in between. It's odd, though, because Sheryl and I look nothing alike. Apart from the obvious facts that we are female and on the downside of middle age, we have few similarities. Sheryl is blonde. I wear a black cap, so who knows what color my hair is. Sheryl wears brightly colored clothes. I strive everyday to impersonate Johnny Cash. I'm pretty sure Sheryl doesn't shop at Goodwill. The only things I buy new are underwear, socks, and shoes: Everything else I wear has been well broken in by someone before me.

In temperament we are dissimilar as well. Sheryl is goodnatured, committed to her job, and devoted to her students. I, on the other hand, am a chronic malcontent, committed to nothing, and devoted mostly to getting enough light. But I do my best to show up and maintain the appearance that I care. After all, I may feel chronically malcontented, but I can look good doing it.