I’m not going to wait until New Year’s Eve to sum up 2010. I’d like to say it’s been a great year overall, but I cannot. It definitely had its high points; I’d have to say most of them on the creative front. Starting this blog was one of the high points of this year, and it is a labor of love. I write for free, I love doing it, and I hope to continue. So many ideas pop into my head each day and as long as there are things to write about, I’ll continue writing.
I wish my daily work life was as inspiring and creative, but it’s not. After over twenty years in academic research science, I have finally reached the point where I can say, it’s just a job. I do it for the money, and it feels ok to say that now. During the 1980s and 1990s I lived for my work. Now I work to live, and any free time I have I want to spend on my creative projects. I finally found my voice and started using it in earnest in 2010, so that is another high point of the year. I’ve been stumbling over using my voice—it’s been there, it’s been waiting to be used, but I’ve always tried to still it for one reason or another. It defied me and jumped out earlier this year. It knew what was best for me. And I’m following its lead, because it is forcing me to be honest with myself in a way that I have never been before. It forces me to face my life each day and ask the question—is this or that working for you? If the answer is no, my inner voice is saying, why are you using time on these things? Why are you wasting your time? And believe me, that’s a powerful inspiration. It means the difference between three hours wasted on the couch watching TV, versus three hours spent immersed in discovering new inroads into my creative self. Sometimes I cannot believe I’ve wasted so much time.
Some of that wasted time has been on stupidities at work, on impossible projects and impossible people. I have to wonder why I did it, and I guess the answer is that I loved my work for so long, and then suddenly I didn’t anymore. How did I get to that point? I guess enough disappointments, bad behavior and lack of professionalism on the part of workplace leaders has gotten to me. I’ve had enough of being treated like a non-entity at work. I am invisible to my workplace—all my competence, training, expertise and wisdom go largely unnoticed. I find that sad. I don’t understand why this is the case, but perhaps the fact that I am not a political animal has played a big role. My work place has been described by the husband of a colleague (who used to work at my hospital) as a ‘merciless power struggle’. I never really understood quite what he meant until 2010. Workplace leaders are primarily concerned with what’s in it for them—in terms of power, positions, salaries and prestige. The fallout of the merger hit us for real this year. With the exception of the leaders who sit at the top like God and make decisions for the rest of us, no one was spared and there was nowhere to hide. Budgets were cut. Strategies were re-written. Projects were not funded. There were no new students. The current infrastructure is imploding and no one can do a thing to stop it. It will crash and burn and I will stand by and watch it happen. I may even rejoice. Nothing works at work anymore—I mean nothing. It is typified in the new copy machine that sits in the room outside the secretaries’ offices. It is a copier, scanner and fax machine in one. It cost easily 20-30,000 USD. No one knows how to use it. If you try to get one copy, you get two even if you only want one. Scan to email? Sure—just follow the instructions—it doesn’t work. No one knows how to use it as a fax machine either; and the old fax machine has been disabled so that we can no longer send or receive faxes. I have a printer/scanner/copier/fax machine at home. I paid 100 USD for it. It works. I just don’t get it—how stupidity took over at work. People are demoralized and it shows on their faces. I’m sure it shows on mine.
This past week was the last straw for me. I ended my membership in the scientists’ union that I have been a member of for many years now. For the past three years I have been a board member of the local union chapter, and this past year I have served as secretary for the new board of the local union chapter that now serves Oslo University Hospital (a merger of four city hospitals). This chapter is headed by a man who is essentially a male chauvinist and a bully. I don’t suffer fools and I definitely don’t suffer male chauvinists. Anyone who knows me knows that. So suffice it to say that we have butted heads. I was evaluated as professor-competent a few years ago together with another colleague at my workplace. This union leader does not believe that we are professor-competent and refuses to accept this fact. He goes around telling people that we are ‘sneaking our way’ through the system and he refuses to back off. It is harassment, pure and simple. He has unilaterally decided that he will be the judge of whether we are worthy of this professor-competent designation or not. With ‘friends’ like this in my union (that exists to protect the interests of its members), who needs enemies? I just add this to the list of crap that I have had to endure, not only this year but in previous years. The problem with the union leader stems from the fact that I refused to badmouth a woman whom this man does not like. This woman has helped me in previous years, and the union leader does not like this fact nor does he like her. I was ordered by him to stop talking to her in a union capacity and I refused. So his ‘punishment’ of me was to try to destroy my professional credibility. So it was easier to withdraw my membership. I have been in Norway for twenty-one years, and I have done nothing but fight for my rights and for my professional credibility since I arrived here. When I first started at my hospital, my Master’s degree from New York University was deemed to be less worth than the Norwegian Master’s degree--fight #1. This led to a reduction in salary for the job that I took over from a woman who had the same education as me (she is Norwegian), and I spent nearly a year trying to get the salary restored to its original level—fight #2. Getting a salary raise each year? Forget it—fight #3. No one would take responsibility for being my ‘boss’ (supporting my salary requests) when it came to this type of thing—but when they wanted the fruit of my hard work—data and results to write their papers---hey, then I was worth talking to. This has gone on for years. I finally got my PhD in 1999, did my three-year post-doc stint, and set out to establish my independent research profile as a scientist. I worked together with three other women and we were a great team. I’ve written about this before. Suffice it to say that we were productive in terms of publications, and I managed to get two of them through Master’s and PhD programs without any major problems. If you ask either one of them, they’ll tell you that I am a good and fair leader. I know this because they’ve told me to my face. How was I rewarded for this? I was told by my leaders that I could not establish my own research group officially. I ignored them and did it unofficially. It ended up not mattering either way because small research groups are not rewarded financially in Norway. This past year I was offered a leadership position (that I was ready for and should have been offered ten years ago but was denied it then when I asked for it) only to have it retracted, then offered again, and finally retracted over a period of three months before my workplace leadership finally figured out what they really wanted, and that was to cut my position, but they ended up not being legally able to do this. We have now reached the point where all the NOs that I have gotten over the past twenty years have led to the current situation—that had they said YES to most of the things I asked for in the context of my professional advancement, they would be enjoying the benefits of my loyalty and hard work. Instead they are trying to figure out what to do with me because I no longer really know which way to turn anymore. When you get told NO long enough, you give up and give in. There have been no mentors, no advisors, no supporters, no career guides---nothing. All my decisions have been made in a vacuum. I have turned to my husband for advice and help and have gotten them, but he is not my boss. He could not pull the strings that should have been pulled for me a long time ago. Simply put, I was a fool to stay so long in one workplace. I should have left after I finished my PhD. But there were so few other places to go to ten years ago. And now, I am done fighting.
