So…You Wanna Be a CUNY Office Assistant

So you want to be a CUNY Office Assistant. Let’s say you spent the money, passed the civil Service Exam and beat the odds of the Hiring Pool in all five boroughs.

Welcome to the ratchet ass world of the City University of New York. Also known as the fourth level of Hell.

A week before you go to work at that hell hole, drink lots of Orange Juice, take vitamin C and Airborne. CUNY is a germ-infested cesspool. I got the flu my first day working there. Then I find out It’s notoriously known as the CUNY FLU and most new hires get sick once they start working there. God damn if they don’t clean that place and make it habitable like every other college. Billions of tax dollars poured into these fucking CUNY schools and they can’t be clean enough to eat off the floors.

And if you have to use the bathroom, just remember there are no paper towels to dry your hands after you wash them. Those were cut in last year's budget. Everybody's gotta use the electric hand dryers or whatever. 

Along with the risks to one’s health As a probational provisional employee, you’ll have to endure a year of torment on your quest to become permanent.

That’s a year of Low pay, shitty slick talking douchebag professors and dirty ass veteran employees who will stab you in the back and twist that shit to make sure you lose your job. Seriously, both COA co-workers and professors and their College Assistant henchmen  will try to fucking sabotage you, especially if you don't come from CUNY.

In the CUNY environment you are on your own. Everyone is against you. While you took the exam legit and earned that spot by passing an interview fair and square, there are a bunch of dirty motherfuckers out to get you fired so they can shoehorn one of their friends into the spot. 

Your co-workers are going to be a bunch of ratchet bitches. They want to bring their cousins and best friends or whatever fucktarded asshole they know into the job through a College Assistant position. Or a Temporary Office assistant position. All they have to do is take the test and pass it.

Because CUNY employees want to be comfortable. The job is a God Damn social club.

The professors are against you. They want to promote their part-time College Assistants or temporary office assistants to full-time CUNY office assistants.

See the Nepotism and Cronyism going on here?

People LIE here about overtime. And they lie often. One minute overtime is a once and a while thing. Then you find out due to budget issues it’s ALL THE TIME THROUGHOUT THE SEMESTER.

Oh, and you won’t be paid time and a half even though you’re paying Union dues. That’s just money being taken out of your check and flushed down a toilet bowl by those greedy fuckers.

Be prepared for a Union that won’t support you. If your supervisor has a grievance against you and wants to get you suspended, or even fired, the Union Shop Steward won’t do shit for you. As I stated before, you are ON YOUR OWN.

Most Union meetings are held once a month on YOUR Lunch hour. During these bitch-and-moan fests, you’ll have to endure gossip, bullshit and more bullshit. Employees whine and moan about entitlements they’re supposed to get, but won’t lift a finger to protect you or contact anyone higher up on the food chain to save your job. Fuck these motherfuckers.

CUNY’s computer network is SHIT. During finals week every semester the entire network SLOWS TO A CRAWL. During these periods you will not be able to access databases, or take out library books on ALEPH. Sometimes even the Internet even stops working. Yes the network is that bogged down.

Oh yeah, the computer at your desk will be a piece of shit. Mine was a 2001 Dell Optiplex that had a fucking beige CRT Tube monitor (companies stopped manufacturing CRT monitors in 2002) with a VGA cable I had to jiggle to get it to work. It’s a miracle the damn thing would get e-mail or word process it was so fucked up.

The PC’s at CUNY are the worst maintained in any college I’ve ever attended. And I can say this not just because I’m an A+ Certified IT technician. I can say this because I’ve seen well put together basic machines at other colleges like Monroe College, Audrey Cohen College, Columbia University and even some retail outlets that blow the doors off the computers I saw at CUNY.

Shit, CUNY computers don’t Adobe Creative suites or Microsoft Office on their computers, essential software in most offices to do the most basic of office tasks. Hell, they don’t even have Adobe Flash Player or Shockwave or even Quicktime like most normal computers in the libraries and lounges at colleges like Columbia University or Monroe College do.

The one I worked on didn’t even have a complete copy of Microsoft Word 2000 on it with all the fonts on it back in 2008. Yeah, the computers are THAT SHITTY. Their IT department is that FUCKED UP. Dammit, how hard is it to install software on a PC? CUNY pays people $60,000 a year and motherfuckers still don’t know how to put A CD in a Tray click install?

While your computer won’t have any Microsoft Office or Adobe CreativeSuite, it will have that fucktarded Norton GoBack software on it which fills computers full of bugs and leads up to at least one BSOD (blue screen of Death) a day. Be prepared for crashes, error messages, and other headaches as you do your work.

And I haven’t gone into CUNY’s dinosaur of a database ESIMS. Does it run on COBOL? FORTRAN? 8” floppy disks? 51/4” Floppy disks? Tape? Punch cards and Vacuums? Whatever it is only one person can log onto that obsolete system one person at a time.

Still think you got a great job? Still think enduring all of this is worth a lousy $26,000 a year?

Then prepare to take care of your paperwork. If the ratchet bitches in HR let you.

Start dates can be delayed due to budget. Or whatever excuse is thrown your way. Chances are they’re just looking for a way to fuck you over before you get the job. The plan is to give you some bullshit excuse and replace you with one of their beloved College assistants or temps. Can you say SCREW JOB?

And before you take care of your paperwork, you have to be fingerprinted. Bring a $70 money order to be made out for your background check. More money down the hole.

You’ll wish you spent the $100 on all of my paperbacks than dealing with this bullshit.

Be prepared to be told by some professors that they don’t want you on day one. Yeah, the resentment and contempt for outsiders at CUNY is that deep. In some cases HR will hire someone and then the person will be told by the professor they’re working for they don’t want them for…well, no reason.

Some of these fuckers have promised the job to one of their beloved college assistants and are mad they didn’t get the job. They hate the fact they have to go through proper channels like the Hiring Pool.  

In this case Call the EEOC and then Sue the pants off these fuckers. Then call your local news and some newspapers and let them know about CUNY’s ratchet ass behavior.

You’ll be starting work in a few days. Or you’ll get a nice settlement.

You’ll get next to no training. Along with the hate you’ll get form CUNY’s professors CUNY’s veteran employees resent new hires and set them up to fail. No, they prefer their friends the student College Assistants and will support them in doing work on the job and will put them over you even though you EARNED the position.

Fuck those motherfuckers.

Oh yeah, don’t let a call go to voicemail. The policy at CUNY is that phones have to be picked up after three rings.

Oh yeah and libraries open at 8:55 even though the signs say 9:00.

Don’t trust the clocks at CUNY, analog or digital. Chances are the time on them is WRONG ALL THE TIME. And the time on all the computers is fucked up too. Off by ten to fifteen minutes in some cases. Why? Because the IT department at CUNY is dumber than a box of trained monkeys. God damn, how hard is it to make sure that the time on a computer is right? A fucking fourth grader can fix time on a computer.

Most of the CUNY Professors you’ll work for and their department Supervisors are ASSHOLES. Arrogant, full of themselves, patronizing and condescending. These guys think they are hot shit but wouldn’t last five minutes at a real University like Columbia a couple of blocks away.

In between the ratchet ass co-workers trying to stab you in the back, Bitch-Made™ Gittelesohn Group Union and the douchebag professors treating you like shit, a day where you don’t want to shoot someone point blank range in the head is considered a good day.

Performance evaluations are BULLSHIT. It doesn’t matter if you do the best job possible, if your supervisor and co-workers don’t like you they’ll make you look like you’re an incompetent employee and look for the most trivial reasons to get you fired.

Even if you survive a year in this war zone don’t get comfortable. Even if you earn permanency, you ain’t gonna keep a job.

Remember it’s a “Probable” permanent. And that permanency is based on the probability of a department’s budget. Budgets are cut at CUNY on a regular basis. Along with CUNY Office Assitant Positions.

In that case your name will be put back on the list.

And you’ll have to endure another round of the Hiring Pools.

Where you’ll remain until traveling the city hoping wishing and praying to find another job until:

CUNY’s HR decide to retire the list, (On the retirement of the list You’ll have to pay ANOTHER $30 to take ANOTHER exam and pass to get on THAT LIST ) or,

You decide to quit and go back to the private sector. Whichever comes first.

Save your money. Save your time. And save yourself a lot of grief.  Avoid the City University of New York’s Civil Service System and find yourself a nice job in the private sector. Work at McDonald’s. Hustle Candy on the train. Beg for change. Anything is better than dealing with that greasy ass organization and the bullshit CUNY puts people through.