What Do Job Descriptions Look Like?

I was watching an older woman walk her small sweater-wearing dog this morning and as she, like every other dog owner in this city, ignored the little pile of goodness her well-dressed fashion poodle left on the trottoir, I joked to my friend Amanda that only in France was dog clothing mandatory while picking up dog shit was considered the optional and frivolous part of dog ownership. Yes, she agreed, it's not in their job description as French people. Don't get me wrong, if I lost my mind and ever owned a small dog, I'm sure dressing it up would be the highlight of my entire life and it would have tons of inexpensive yet stylish raincoats, and maybe even matching boots.

I liked her observation a lot about the French job description and hard work they must do to maintain cultural stereotypes, because as far as I can tell, no one in France really has a concrete job description-- my contract doesn't explain vital pieces of infomation like my salary or how many hours I really have to teach each semester (hence the reason I accepted all the hours I was scheduled for and did a ton of overtime without realizing it last year). Being in the throes of negotiating the right not to have to work any extra hours next semester and exceed my contract requirements, I'm definitely experiencing some fun surprise revelations regarding my job description, all of which were mysteriously not the case last year but are all, of course, highly convenient and all to my employer's advantage.

As I am fond of saying to other anglophones, it's no coincidence that Beckett wrote in French because everything is arbitrarily cloaked in mystery and the French administration only reveals little tidbits about your job, life, tax declaration, etc. one by one, much like a treasure hunt or a slow tantalizing striptease over the years and you, of course, never have all the information you need when you need it. The French bureaucratic universe really doesn't make any sense and seems mainly to be comprised of Rules That I Just Made Up. I once went to my bank 3 times within a 2 week period to make cash withdraws in person while I was waiting for a new ATM card and every single time, there was a different process to follow to make my withdraw. Psychotic, non?

On my way home today, I tried to imagine our linguistics professor's job. Who knows if she understands her contract or not, but when she takes the metro, she must always be on professional red alert. A large part of her class-- and I enjoy it a lot-- seems to be spotting metro ads with complicated linguistic puns that she can then make her students analyze and classify phonetically and phonemically. I like this because it is also about decoding a foreign system and often also includes new spelling rules that someone just made up. The ads are often way easier to understand than job contracts and French bureaucracy and at least the professor is there to explain them. Universities everywhere would probably have to stop teaching linguistics classes if advertising were suddenly banned from the metro. And there would probably be some convenient new line added to someone's job description to justify it.