Thoughts of a Rent-a-Librarian:

I'm blogging tonight from a cheap apartment near a place I'll call "Huron State University", where I've just begun a six-month temporary contract. I can't regard this as an end to the job search, but perhaps it will stop the financial bleeding for a while.

Now if I can only find a REAL job.

On the positive side, the surrounding city has several thousand college students and faculty and a correspondingly large number of theaters, bookstores, and other ways to spend money productively. Unfortunately, this university feels no particular need to pay a decent salary to term employees. That honor, in academia, is apparently reserved for stellar performers like the former president of my former employer. After running it into the ground financially and announcing that, as a result, the university would lay off hundreds of staff and abolish several departments and programs (including the only public radio and television stations within 150 miles), she made a tearful, public pledge to forgo all future salary increases from said employer. True to her word, within two months she jumped ship to a larger university, where she's currently receiving a cool quarter-million a year and free use of a university-supplied house and Lincoln Towncar. (See last paragraph in this story.)

Isn't it nice to see Virtue Rewarded?

That's all for now. I'm off to see whether the local repertory-theater company can do a creditable job with George Bernard Shaw's Candida. Of course, I won't get any staff or faculty discount, since the university's bureaucracy is still claiming that I don't exist because I'm not in the computer network, and therefore can't have a university ID.