After ten years of getting the run around from the various departments that support the academic community within the university, I've decided that the support staff have better jobs than the academics.

Every year at the university, I have had to deal with mistakes made by paper pushing bureaucrats in ever different department related to making the university function so that teaching and learning can happen. Those departments include: the library, the registrar, the financial aid office, the payroll department and especially the health care department. The people working in these positions get paid and get benefits and have job security even though they make mistakes that take hours and hours of my time every year to correct. The problem is that I don't get paid to amend their mistakes in order to get through my education, get my health care, get my employment documents, or even get my financial aid. If I logged all the hours I have spent in the last decade correcting mistakes of people paid to manage paper work and administrate within the aforementioned departments, I've given them weeks of unpaid labor.

The reason why they have the best jobs is that they get paid no matter how badly they do their jobs and consider mistakes a part of the process. These people keep their benefits and there are no accountability structures established to make these bureaucrats fix the problems they create for people trying to give and receive academic instruction. This is a good job. You can be mediocre, have a secure job and health care benefits and retirement and a nice life. If I would have chosen to just blend into the wood work with my life and taken a job in a big diffuse university or other public bureaucracy, I would have some job security and health benefits that I know would continue from year to year.

Instead, I chose to brave the world of creativity and achievement and have to live with the insecurity of the cost of building organizations that didn't previously exist while I also have to support the nice secure jobs of people who take my unpaid labor to undue the havoc their actions have created in my life. Yes, in the end, I hope to overcome the building phase and reap the fruit of joy from hard work and accomplishments. Nevertheless, I have a real sweet spot developing in my heart for security of people who can screw up, not think twice about the consequences, and get job security and health care benefits for it.