Words, Like Violence, Break the Silence

For those who've missed it, a job market horror story's developing. In comments, Anon. 12:01 points us to the wiki, where we find this update about Mount Ida college: "Contact specifying that certain candidates were contacted in error and are not on the short list (1/10)".

What now? Let's go over this slowly. This department contacted some people, telling them they were on a shortlist for fly-outs. I can't say for sure how those people felt about that, but my guess is they were fucking elated. You know, because they'd managed to stave off failure for another month, and maybe, just maybe they'd have a real shot at employment come September. You know that's called? It's called hope. I can remember what it feels like. I feels like almost the best thing in the entire fucking world.

Then what? "Contact specifying that certain candidates were contacted in error." Or as Anon. 9:16 reports:

It's actually worse than that. I got an email saying only that I should call the number below for information updating me on the philosophy search. I called the number and left a message within minutes of leaving the message. So she wasn't answering her phone immediately after sending the email. Then I tried calling again at intervals of 10-20 minutes for the rest of the day. Sometimes it rang once and went to voicemail. Sometimes it rang a number of times and went to voicemail. I never got a living person. This suggests to me that they might actually have sent these short list messages out to a pretty large group, if she was tied up on the phone all day explaining it to them. I still haven't gotten confirmation that I was sent the message erroneously, but I'm assuming that's why I was contacted.

"You know that hope we just gave you? Yeah. . . not so much, actually. We're just going to take that right back. Thanks so much." Holy fucking god, I can't believe how much that sucks. Will Philosophize for Food got the same shit:

Yeah, tell me about it. I was the one who got the disappointing news and posted it. Apparently a screw up by the Administrative Assistant in the Office of Human Resources, who sent email(s) to the wrong person(s). And I was really staking my self-worth on that--it being my only other interview.

I got drunk last night.

That sounds about right. On the job market, there isn't a whole fuck of a room between hope and drinking to cope.