Half-sitting, half-standing, all-the-way-jumping in surprise, my foot got caught in the wheels of my chair and I tripped. My glasses fell off my face, landing on the carpet – and, as if I were a character in some farce by Molière, I fell straight into Sadie’s lap.
‘Well, this is quite a re-introduction, Dr Fisher!’ the woman standing in our doorway said cheerfully.
Then she wagged her finger playfully at us. ‘I know you two are married, but no hanky-panky in the office.’
She was clearly joking, but my face must have been beetroot red as I righted myself. ‘Professor Vargas,’ Sadie said, her own blush starting to creep up her chest as she handed back my thankfully-unbroken glasses. ‘Lovely to see you.’
‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘You startled us. We didn’t think anyone else was here.’
Professor Sofia Vargas was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, but she had a massive voice that far outsized her.You know those stories about Tolkien teaching at Oxford and basing Treebeard on C.S. Lewis after hearing his voice echoing down the halls?Sadie had said to me after the HR call about my partner hire,Vargas has the same vibe.
‘Oh, it’s only me here today,’ Professor Vargas said. ‘We do a lot of working from home at Lyons these days. The corridor does have a bit of a zombie apocalypse feel, doesn’t it?’
We both laughed nervously.
At least this would solve our office space problem. We’d still be on top of each other, working from home, but not quitethison top of each other.
‘Although not now you two are here!’ Professor Vargas said, immediately shattering my delusions. ‘We’re taking full advantage of the fact we’ve finally got some continuing staff whose teaching hasn’t been completely bought out by research grants. You’ll be in front of alotof classes this semester!’
Then she paused, regarding our tiny office as if for the first time. ‘Lucky you’re a married couple. You’d really want to like someone you were crammed into this box with, wouldn’t you?’
We both laughed nervously again. ‘Lucky,’ I echoed, unconvincingly.
‘Come down the hall to my office. Let’s talk through your workloads somewhere with more space, shall we?’
Vargas’s office looked much more like the office of my dreams. Fewer overstuffed bookcases, perhaps, but the windows had stained-glass detailing around the edges, and the little coffee table with a couch and armchairs she had in the corner was more comfort than even my ambitious internal interior designer had dared to dream of. ‘This must look horribly unfair, after the closet we’ve stuck you in,’ she said apologetically as she gestured at us both to sit, ‘but being theHead of the School of Humanities does come with its privileges.’ She grinned broadly at us. ‘Hopefully someone will retire soon and we can get you a bit more square footage, hey?’
There was no other response we could make but to laugh nervously once more.
‘All right.’ Vargas logged into her laptop then turned it around to face us. ‘I know we hired you both on 40-40-20 contracts, and it was my intention to try and honour the spirit of that as well as the letter.’
When you were in the precariat, a 40-40-20 contract seemed both as magical and out of reach as a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It meant you were getting paid to work on your research 40% of the time, teaching another 40%, and doing service – committees and admin and various other stuff – 20%.
‘But like I said,’ Vargas went on, ‘the Lit Studies department is in a bit of a staffing pickle at the moment. Your new Head of Department – that’s Lachlan Petrovski, you’ll meet him tomorrow – and I have had to be a bit creative in planning out your workload.’
Sadie glanced at me. I recognised the unease in her eyes. She clearly hadn’t forgotten the name of my dad’s ‘old chum’ either.
But then I registered what the spreadsheet on Vargas’s screen actually said, and all thoughts of Petrovski disappeared completely from my mind.
A 40-40-20 contract meant that, theoretically, you were working a lot more than a casual academic – it was full-time, after all, not hourly. Practically, though, it had always seemed like it would be a lot less work, because you were actually getting paid for your research instead of doing it for free on the side in the vague hope it would one day earn you one of these mythical contracts.
That was technically probably still true – butmy fucking God, the amount of teaching they had loaded us up with for the semester was eye-watering.
All of it was lecturing. And all of it was together.
What they’d done, Vargas explained to us, was manipulate our respective 40% teaching allocations to get us in front of as many students as possible. Sadie and I would be chairing two units each – her, a first-year unit on contemporary literature and a second-year unit on Romanticism; me, a first-year unit on classic literature and a second-year unit on medievalism – but all of the small-group seminar teaching and marking would be done by casual academics. We would be doing the large-group teaching, co-lecturing all four units together (‘we know you’ve been very successful as a teaching team in the past, so we thought – let’s lean on that!’).
Semesters at Lyons were thirteen weeks long. Lectures went for an hour and took place weekly.
That meant that, between us, Sadie and I were going to have to writefifty-two lectures.
The word-count sweet spot for an hour-long lecture for me was between five and six thousand words. I tried to do the maths on the total word count we were expected to produce – apparently, according to the workload calculator, with just one lone hour of prep time per lecture – and my brain started making static noises like an old television.35
‘I know it’s a lot,’ Vargas said, smiling apologetically at us, ‘but it’s a great long-term investment. Once the lectures are written, you’ll be able to use them for years.’
‘Oh,’ was all my bolshy wife – who had never backed down from an argument in her entire fucking life, and who I knew, from being at dozens of the same union meetings as her, had very strong views on staff exploitation – said.
‘I don’t suppose the staff previously teaching the unit have notes we could use as a scaffold…?’ I asked cautiously.
