I have only been in one fight. It was during the time of life where we as a people get the closest to the kind of violence driven societal breakdown depicted in Lord of the Flies: yep, I am talking about middle school gym class. Derek Something-or-other was making fun of my less than stellar volleyball skills. While his criticisms were spot on (I am not a strong volleyball player), I found them to be a bit much. Now, at that time of my life I was pretty quiet and shy, like Simon (although others may have categorized me as more of a Piggy), but on the bus ride home (also close to a Lord of the Flies type situation) I decided I would channel my inner Jack if it happened again. The next day, it happened again and Derek Something-or-other got the pushing of his lifetime. I had had enough and felt as though I had to act.
I was reminded of this moment of my life when last week, a group of archivists on Twitter reached that point of action as well. There was a job posted on the A&A that, as I have talked about before, I thought was undervaluing our degrees and experience. I tweeted it. Others people, including @benuski, tweeted more terrible positions. Then @meau took the initiative and started the blog You Ought to be Ashamed at http://eatingouryoung.wordpress.com. A group of archivist will be using this blog as a forum to…, well, lets be honest here, we will be using it to call out crappy job postings. I really, really hope this blog wil not be around very long for lack of content, but I have my doubts…
I will be one of the people contributing, so please let me know if you see any bad postings out there. Maureen has dubbed us the Justice League (in case you are wondering which Super Friend I am, the answer is Gleek), and hopefully we will be able to at least point out some of the uninformed and misrepresented postings that appear out there, some of which even make it to SAA’s job announcement page and the listserv. Professionals should not tolerate part time or intern positions that require degrees, extensive professional experience, or even certification! The people that post these jobs should feel shame.
New Archivist 
Thanks for advertising this new and interesting crappy employment blog. As always, I enjoy your posts. I have a quick “they did the math wrong” story. I applied for a government archives job in a much larger city with a higher cost of living than the one I was working in at the time. The job would have been a promotion for me as far as responsibilities were concerned. But it would have required me to take a pay cut to move to a city with a higher cost of living. They didn’t provide relocation expenses either. Where was their math? Needless to say, I’m glad I didn’t get that job after an interview. Thankfully I was hired elsewhere and make over 10k more than this job was offering, living in a very small town with a much lower cost of living. That is a success story.
It seems that in this economy, there is more and more “crappy’ employment available. Those that I have talked to recently who are looking for jobs complain that they need a degree just to get a minimum wage, entry level job. There is just so much competition that people are becoming desperate. As long as there are qualified folks willing to take low-paying jobs, then it forces everyone to accept less.