Latest salary statistic.

Was reading Jane the other day... how do they do that?

It always arrives, quite magically, the day I get my period.

Yippee.

Anyway the most striking statistic, and one that stayed with me all week, was from a sidebar on the average price of a car, how much you should spend on one, etc.

Factoid of the week: The average salary of a car salesman (or sales person, if you will) is ~$45,000. This is with no educational requirements, maybe a high school degree, but maybe not even that.

Forty five thousand a year is more than I make now.

I guess I'm thinking about this because it's tax time, and looking at my YTD totals for 200x always makes me want to cry.

Is this really all I'm worth? I know it's a quintessentially American worry, as if a person's worth were measured in dollars alone. But it does send a message that I should be grateful for the hell I'm in, like I'm some kind of lower caste citizen.

And it's looking more and more like I could and probably would have to stay in a postdoc-ish position for another 1-3 years before I can get out of here. Not sure how much postdoc and how much "ish" I would be required to put up with, or how on earth I will last that long.

I'm trying not to think about it, just take it one day at a time, but it's hard to function that way, especially when my experiments usually take at least a couple of days, if not weeks, from start to finish.

And considering this was actually a pretty good week, I'm trying hard to forget that there are likely more bad weeks soon enough, on the horizon.

Meanwhile, some of my "colleagues" have been coming back from faculty interviews lately, with varying reports. There are the ones who say it went horribly and expect to have to do it all again next year. Bad for them. Bad for me if I apply then, since I'll be competing with that many more people, and they will have had a year of practice run interviews.

There are years and years of these backlog people, still looking for jobs. So it just gets harder and harder for everyone... and you can see why search committees start to be tempted to take these people with nearly a decade of experience over someone with half that much. They have nothing if not tenacity.

Then there are the ones who already have ranked all the schools in order of where they'd like to go, and are now trying not to lose sleep while waiting to hear if the schools ranked them similarly, like med school match game.

My heart goes out to them, it really does. At least they made it this far.

Then there are the ones who had several interviews, but refuse to reveal any opinions about how it went or where they'd most like to be. Can't learn much from them. I guess I'll just have to wait and see where they go, and assume that was the best fit for them, for whatever reasons, but I likely won't hear much about the places they didn't choose.

So I am sitting on the sidelines, feeling like the third string player cleaning out the gatorade buckets while everyone else is in the game.

Oh wait, those guys get paid more than I do, too.