Performing failure presents radical opportunities for reimagining the world. Drawing from critical autoethnographic accounts, I utilize performance as a method to examine individual and structural failures in the online classroom from my perspective as a contingent faculty member. I contend that online education structurally compels teachers into "help desk" positions. Drawing from staged conspicuous aesthetic performance, I examine how these positions perpetuate systemic inequity and foreclose opportunities to engage in critical communication pedagogy. Not only is performance a meaningful way to explore and analyze pedagogical failure, but it is significant for critical communication pedagogy as a way of extending reflexive practices and devising alternative educational possibilities.