I talked with the present office-holder in the serious job at school today that I’m being considered to fill. I asked him about when he’s going to interview for the post. It was supposed to be today. Turns out he’s been ordered to put the brakes on; the school doesn’t want to rush on this, and my colleague of 9-10 years has been asked not to do any interviews yet. So interviews probably won’t be held for another 2-5 weeks…
assuming that they’re held at all. A lot of these sorts of jobs here get filled using a fair amount of backroom maneuvering, and it may be that they want him to hold back because they want to have the candidate picked before he makes any sort of recommendation. It wouldn’t surprise me that the boss has already got someone in mind for this job, and my colleague the current job-holder has already been ruled irrelevant to the process. Never mind that he’s been doing it for a number of years with substantial success; the head will choose his own guy to do the job, and the likely in-house candidates will kinda be passed over.
I know this is how this institution works, and I’m not at all upset by it. If that’s how they were going to handle things, though, I wish they had done it differently than to first ask me if I was interested, and then back off from that. Now I have to disengage a little from the idea that school placement might be my job next year, and concentrate on teaching right now. At the same time, though, I’m thinking about stuff I want to do this summer, and being the school placement dude would seriously change what I was planning on doing with parts of June, July and August. After all, I’d need to learn the profiles of sixty kids, their parents, and a hundred fifty schools, mostly by visiting and meeting them personally. You can’t do that on a whim; you have to plan.
When lends credence to the idea that the school already has the new director picked out. Annoying but true. We weren’t really being offered the job; my colleague was just asked to think about possibilities as a pro forma of satisfying his ego. When he actually went ahead and started to talk to his possible candidates, that’s when his leash got pulled. Another delightful effect of working in a benevolent dictatorship.
