The Library Job

[thefourthvine]

This one is for Frostfire, who expressed interest in hearing about my weirdest job ever.

I applied for my first college work-study job just before getting my wisdom teeth removed. I got called to interview for it while I was waiting for my oral surgeon to call me back after I woke up with my head basically a pulsating orb. And I interviewed for it with antibiotics and painkillers coursing through my bloodstream, still so swollen my speech was slurred. I wasn’t exactly coherent, so possibly I missed some of the warning signs.

The university library system happily hired me despite my disjointed mumbling (work-study jobs required essentially no qualifications, skills, or education), and I was enthused. I liked the libraries! I had spent much of my life since the age of 12 in those specific libraries! (I did research and literature reviews for grad students in my mother’s department. If you gave me a topic and a bunch of copy cards and some money, I would return absolutely every available paper on your topic within a week. Should I have been doing that? I do not know, but a lot of the grad students used my services. Should I have been writing the literature review chapters of their theses and dissertations? Absolutely not, but I didn’t realize that until I started college myself, so that particular university awarded a number of degrees to people whose dissertations were partly written by, well, me. I still feel extremely guilty about that.) I got assigned to the main library’s Gifts Department. I was going to get to go behind the scenes! And maybe ... open gifts? I wasn’t sure.

I showed up on the first day, before classes actually started, and met my fellow Gifts work-studies: Harley, who I would be working with, and Carlos, who I would be replacing. (Carlos’s entire comment on the job was, “I guess it’s fine,” accompanied by a giant eyeroll.) Gifts, it turned out, was a small fiefdom of tables, desks, and bookshelves in the giant, sprawling country of First Floor, which is how everyone referred to it. No article, just “You’ll have to go to First Floor,” or “Check in First Floor.” On one side of our cubicle walls was Cataloging. On the other side was Shipping.

We were very, very far from the Offices, the actual rooms with windows that contained important librarians, and several floors below Administration, the heart of all real power in the library. This was extremely significant, since the main library was like an ancient city, and your proximity to the Offices and the Administration showed your status. Our status was: I guess they’re here, too?

Harley told me all this, and then said, “Jean’s going to show you around, but don’t worry. I’ll train you.” (Harley, with a semester and a summer of experience under her belt, was extremely motivated to not be the only work-study in Gifts, and she knew if I quit early I would not be replaced for months.)

At exactly nine o’clock, Jean arrived. Jean was in charge of the Gifts Department, and also its sole full-time employee. She gave me a tour of the area, which took much longer than you’d expect given that it was maybe 300 square feet total. She showed me the computers, which lurked under giant sturdy plastic dust covers. “Don’t ever touch them,” she said, and embarked on a ten-minute, utterly bewildering explanation that involved lost data, security risks, and expensive equipment. She showed me the shelves with donated materials. “Don’t touch these,” she said, “until you know what to do. These are very important. We cannot lose any. I worry all the time about this, with so many new people in here every semester, and we have misplaced things before, and that cannot happen, so don’t touch this until I tell you you can. Don’t touch anything here. Not anything, don’t touch it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can do something wrong, so don’t touch anything.” That was just how Jean talked.

“Okay,” I said. It was one of three times I spoke during the entire tour. I had said “Okay” after the computer speech, and I said it for the final time after she explained to me that I had to be exactly on time and leave exactly on time. “You can’t be early,” she said. “Not even by two minutes. The thing is, we could get in trouble. If you’re early you’re not supposed to be here. You’re not supposed to be here, and we could get in trouble. If you’re early, I’ll have to write you up. Because you’re not supposed to be here.” This was not, let me note, official library policy; it was a strictly Jean policy. She had many, including “Don’t touch your own hair” and “Don’t mention anything negative because it could cause me to get cancer.”

Later, Harley explained to me what the Gifts Department actually did. People donated items to the university library system all the time. Often they were items the library didn’t want or already had, and those were easy to deal with -- if we had the item, but the gift was in better shape, it was added. If we didn’t want the item, it was given or thrown away. (Most donations were thrown away. Ideally while Jean was at lunch, because she could agonize for up to an hour about throwing away a moldy newspaper.) But sometimes they were rare items -- some professor donating all his volumes of a German journal that ceased publication in 1967, say -- and then someone who knew the subject or the language had to decide if they were useful enough that the library should add them. So they were placed on a shelf in a given evaluator’s section, and when the evaluators came by, they looked through their section and told us what to do with the items.

The evaluators, most of them professors in the relevant fields, generally had to be harassed into coming by, because -- and if Jean is still alive, please don’t tell her this -- the donated materials were basically never interesting or important, and no one cared about them at all except for Jean.

The philosophy evaluator was our most discussed evaluator, largely because we yearned to lay eyes on him. He never came by. His section covered one entire bookcase, with donated items on it that had been waiting for up to a decade. He never answered his office phone or his email. Harley and I both walked past his office a dozen times in the year I was in Gifts, and he was never there. I suspect he was actually a thought experiment that got out of hand.

The material arts evaluator was our most popular one, though. He did come by -- regularly, once a month, without reminders. And when I said no one cared about the donations at all, that wasn’t entirely true -- that specific arts evaluator did, in the same way he seemed to care about literally every other thing in the universe. He sometimes brought in cool stuff he’d found on the walk over, like an interestingly shaped twig or a shard of broken mirror or, once, a live beetle. (Technically, according to a Jean Rule, we were not supposed to talk to him, but, well. It would have been rude not to admire his twigs and beetles, and he always timed his visits for Jean’s lunch, so it was safe for us to talk to him.) He was punished for his diligence and general good cheer; we put every single thing that could even tenuously be related to art on his shelf, although he never seemed to mind. “Hey,” he would say, flipping through a sales pamphlet on pencils, “listen to this!” And he would read it out loud to us before saying, “Someone might find this valuable. Let’s add it.”

The second thing that we had to do in Gifts was obtain any existing basic information on them and put it in or on the item for the evaluators to ignore. Now, we could have done this by looking the books up on the computers, printing out the OCLC information for them, sticking that in the book, and calling it a day. We could have done that.

But Jean really wasn’t kidding about not using the computers. Only IT was allowed to turn them on. They were updated twice a year and replaced from time to time and otherwise they sat in pristine condition under their dust covers. Just touching the dust covers made Jean incredibly nervous, and unfortunately being nervous made Jean angry, and when she was angry she lectured forever and made new rules, so we never did it. (Jean never checked her email, which meant she, and we, missed out on a lot of stuff. She was very hurt, for example, to be left out of every gift exchange, but they were organized by email.)

So instead, we had to go to the card catalog. Now, the library didn’t use the card catalog. It hadn’t in quite some time. But they hadn’t thrown it away, probably because it was so pretty. Instead, it was stored in sections in the lowest basement in the library, several floors below the publicly accessible basement and one floor below the only basement with offices in it. To get to it, you had to take the special elevator down to the lowest office floor, walk through it, and then take the unlit emergency stairs down to the very lowest basement.

I never did find out what the people in the basement offices did -- I assume, from their location, something even less valued than Gifts -- but they were nice to us. Sometimes they gave us cookies, and unlike everyone on First Floor, they were not involved in any of the endless interdepartmental wars. Mostly, they felt sorry for us, because the lowest basement was a terror. As a cost-cutting measure, half the lights were out in there, and it was full of random old furniture and mystery boxes and precarious stacks of paper and spiders who didn’t appreciate our arrival.

So we’d go down with titles and authors written on a sheet of paper, and we’d copy out whatever information we could glean from the many-years-out-of-date card catalog, and then we’d climb back up the stairs and walk through the offices and wave cheerfully to the people who worked in the basement and take the elevator back up to First Floor.

Then we had to type up the information we’d written down. On special cards. We were not allowed to handwrite anything, as Jean worried our handwriting would cause problems for the evaluators. (In my case: fair enough. Harley’s writing was nice, though.) And that was really unfortunate, because the library system did not acknowledge the existence of typewriters. They had all been officially phased out. So IT wouldn’t service the Gifts typewriter. Purchasing wouldn’t buy typewriters or typewriter supplies. No one would touch our typewriter. It was the only one left in the entire building, and it was ancient and cranky and way past retirement, and we had to use it, and it could not be replaced or repaired.

Jean had two work-studies for two reasons. One was that she could no longer use the stairs down into the spider basement, and the other was the typewriter. It took forever to type anything. Jean got impatient with it, so her work-studies had to do that. (Jean did have another typewriter, but it was her personal typewriter, and she used it only to type thank you letters for gifts; she didn’t want to risk harming it with the thicker cards we had to type on. She locked her typewriter up when she was not using it, and made it clear she’d cheerfully kill any work-study who looked at it too closely.)

The typewriter had so many quirks that we compiled a cheat sheet. We also had to become amateur typewriter repairpeople -- ones who weren’t allowed to use Google, because that would involve the computers in those days before smartphones -- even though prior to our arrival in Gifts, neither of us had ever touched one before. Harley and I were among the most successful work-studies Jean ever had, because we had a great willingness to open up the typewriter, and one guiding philosophy: Well, it’s not like we can make it worse.

You can do a lot to a typewriter with a paperclip, a screwdriver, and a complete willingness to fuck shit up, and we did. That kept it running. But still you had to hit return four to six times to move down a line, and we never knew why. (Each use of the return key moved the carriage down a very small and variable amount. You just had to eyeball it.) You could not type certain keys after other keys without a two-second cool-down period unless you wanted to get your paperclip out. (We kept a box taped to the typewriter table, since Purchasing was happy to supply those.) Sometimes the letters typed over or partly over the other letters, and you had to watch like a hawk for that to happen, then hit the spacebar after each letter you typed until it stopped. You also could not just crank the cards into the typewriter; whatever part was supposed to allow that no longer existed. Instead, you had to pry open the typewriter with the screwdriver (attached to a long string of rubber bands, which was also taped to the table) and put the card in, then close it quickly (being careful of appendages -- the typewriter had many sharp spots and drew blood at least once a week) and hope the card ended up in the part of the typewriter where it was possible to type. (Sometimes it got lost in the bowels of the typewriter. Dealing with that was a two-person job, and both people would end up covered in weird stains.) I could go on, but you get the point.

We could have accomplished just as much writing just as quickly if Jean had supplied us with wax tablets, a stylus, and a cuneiform dictionary. (If you’re wondering if we could just go into the public part of the library and use the computers there: no. Jean checked. And if we went into the public part of the library while working we’d be fired, another Jean Rule.)

But the most dangerous part of the job was not the typewriter, even though we were the only department that had to restock their first aid box every month. The most dangerous part was after the evaluators had been dragged into the library to read our slightly bloodied cards and review our carefully sorted materials. Because then we had to take the materials to be added to Cataloging.

Jean was at war with Cataloging. I only ever heard some of why, but my best understanding is that -- well. Remember how we shared a cubicle wall with Cataloging? Following a First Floor rearrangement that occurred at roughly the same time I was in middle school, Jean decided that Gifts had been shorted some space, so she decided to handle that by gradually shifting the shared cubicle wall over, just an inch or so a day.

Do not try this on catalogers, that’s my advice. They will notice, and they will be pissed, and they will never, ever get over it. (In fairness to them, Jean was incredibly annoying basically all the time, and they were close enough to Gifts to hear her talking, and she never stopped talking.) The catalogers refused to speak to us, except for one of them, and she would only speak to the work-studies, not Jean, and only when the other catalogers and Jean weren’t around. Instead, they communicated with us by note. (Keep in mind the departments were separated by one four-foot cubicle wall, and you will understand how impressive it was that they never even looked at us. To them, we were a blank void, even though that required them to create, through sheer force of will, a blind spot that took up at least 25% of their field of vision.)

So we would drop off the selected materials on their book cart, to be met with pointed, bone-chilling silence and an absolute refusal to acknowledge our existence so intense that I swear it inflicted actual psychic damage. We’d go to lunch or go home and come back to all the materials on our “In” table with a note indicating that we had failed to provide the requested information in the appropriate format. The information we did provide would be attached, annotated in red ink. Harley and I would try again, fighting with the recalcitrant, semi-sentient, vengeful typewriter, and get something that was a closer approximation to what the catalogers wanted. We would take everything back to Cataloging, enduring yet more frostbite-inducing chill and hostility. The next day, the materials would be back again with a note, this one perhaps saying they could not accept them as the information card didn’t have the appropriate evaluator’s signature on it. (The original offending card had, but of course we couldn’t copy that.) We’d staple the old card and the new card together and try again.

They never ran out of reasons. Ever. It usually took about eight rounds of notes for our materials to be cataloged, and 90% of the time that happened because the One Cataloger took pity on us and did it after the work day was over.

And, yes, there were occasional meetings about this, but nothing ever got resolved. Jean started every single one by repeating, at length, her belief that Cataloging was somehow responsible for the decreased space allotted to Gifts in the remodel, and she had a carefully-kept history of every movement of the cubicle walls since then, with measurements, and basically she never got to the actual problem, which was that Cataloging wasn’t cataloging our materials. The catalogers just sat there silently in the meetings, letting Jean talk herself out of any assistance from the people in charge. And for reasons that I imagine are obvious, the actual librarians and library managers did not want to have those meetings. So it just kept being that way.

I lasted a year in Gifts, and Harley and I quit together, so we wrote up an incredibly detailed guidebook to the typewriter, the Cataloging War, the spider basement, and where to get more bandaids, among many other things, and left it under the typewriter. We figured Jean would never find it there, and the new work-studies would the first time they had to do a card removal. I hope it helped.

My next work-study job was in Publications in the university’s computer and internet department, and while that did involve both a vicious, endless cheesecake war and a t-shirt grudge so legendary that the very first item covered during my training was “NEVER mention t-shirts in ANY way and honestly just steer clear of talking about clothes at all on Fridays,” it was so, so much better, largely because I worked for Cathy and Danny, who actually looked after their work-studies. (We always got pieces of cheesecake in the cheesecake war, for example.)

I tell you what, though: my time in Gifts was incredibly educational. I learned how to deal with difficult people. Even more, though, I learned how to function in a world with different rules, where absolutely nothing makes sense or happens logically, and where no improvements can ever be made. I already had a significant amount of training in that from going to public school, but this was the college-level class in it.

And, as a final note -- Best Beloved and I were together during this period of my life. When she read through this, she said, “Yes, this it true, but it ... doesn’t really capture how weird it all was.” But doing that would require a whole book. (And if I’m going to write a book about this, it’s going to be a fantasy novel, maybe about work-studies who find a portal in the spider basement. It would turn out everyone in the whole building knew about the portal and just never mentioned it, and also on the other side of the portal would be the library that actually made sense.)

Comments

[hannah]

Terry Pratchett absolutely toned it down when he wrote about the Unseen University's library.

And I'm suddenly remembering Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

[happydork]

I am in awe of you for lasting a year! And worried by the thought of just how much blood was shed on that typewriter, and the implications for the typewriter's immortal soul.

[isweedan]

This was FASCINATING.

[afrikate]

I’m honestly so fascinated by Jean. Just the entire concept of such a difficult and persnickety person, who makes other people’s life and her own life so very difficult. Who is so committed to her worldview that she never realizes how much more difficult her life is than it has to be. Also, feeling so much sympathy for her supervisors, who couldn’t actually fire her.

[kitewithfish]

Wow. Just. I kind of wonder if Jean walked out of the Screwtape Letters, she's so devoted to her subterranean pedantry. Very funny to read!

[lorem_ipsum]

"But doing that would require a whole book. (And if I’m going to write a book about this, it’s going to be a fantasy novel,"

FWIW, I absolutely was thinking when you got to the part about the one evaluator with the bugs and sticks that I would pay money for the fantasy novelization of this. <3

[mildred_of_midgard]

Your posts are like exquisite gems. As I read this, my jaw dropped ever lower, until it nearly joined the spiders in the basement. Thank you for sharing!

[lferion]

I would read that book! In a heartbeat!

[watersword]

I need to hear about the cheesecake war.

[seascribble]

Oh my god, I think my blood pressure went up reading this.

[dine]

amazing! I pity anyone who had to deal with Jean - my sincere empathy for past!you

if you ever do write that fantasy novel, I'll be over here gulping it down SO FAST

[princessofgeeks]

O M G

[oriolegirl]

This is hilarious because I can totally see this happening. Academic libraries are some of the most dysfunctional workplaces in existence. I imagine Jean hung in there until they forced her to retire at age 75, still waging a bitter war with Cataloging. (Never wage a war with Cataloging. You will lose.)

[soc_puppet]

Okay, I'll admit, the first pastry chef I worked for wasn't quite this bad, but that was mostly because our entire building and all the equipment in it was much more modern and/or up-to-date, and she therefore didn't have a choice about using computers.

May she and Jean someday meet in hell.

[azurelunatic]

I sincerely hope that Jean wound up somewhere with no subordinates to terrify.

[kayloulee]

I work in archives and libraries. We had a Jean. Her name was Janet. She finally retired about five years ago after a dispute with the student assistants, because she would leave them notes in spidery handwriting, which none of them could read, then get mad at them for not doing what she told them to do, and madder when they suggested she type the notes up instead. Admittedly the gulf between their technological literacy (excellent) and hers (from the 1980s) was huge, but I know damn well she could type at least - although I don't think she understood word processing programs, much less Google Docs, which is what they thought she should use. When I was a student assistant 10 years ago, her handwriting wasn't so bad. But she liked me, so I could get away with more. We didn't have typewriters, we were allowed to use the computer (we had to, that was our main job) but she didn't like us doing things she hadn't taught us to do. The computer catalogue, by the way, had been installed around 1998 (it was 2009 by the time I was there) and never updated.

Her main goal was to get our catalogue hooked into the university library catalogue, which was never ever going to happen. Her secondary goal was to get the students to do exactly as she told them without asking questions, which was also never ever going to happen. After she finally retired and I came back as a professional she was really concerned that I did a massive collections weed and demanded to check my work, I assume because how could I, her student, ever understand weeding policies?! She hadn't taught me that! But her BFF was on the board so I had to let her. Then she saw my massive boxes of falling apart books and Windows Server for Dummies 1998 and had to concede defeat. I haven't seen her since then but I'd hear if she'd died, so I assume she hasn't yet.

[celtprincess13]

As always, when you're writing, I can see the scene fully formed in my head. I worked with someone similar to Jean, so I definitely feel your pain with that.

[lilacsigil]

I did high school work experience at a library in the late 1980s and it was low-level Jeans all the way down, all ferociously defending their tiny patch of turf from each other and from the future. But at least there was no spider basement!

[minnaway]

This was hilariously told. I am just picturing Purchasing, signing off on box after box of paper clips and first aid boxes and occasionally saying to each other: "But what are they doing down there?" "It's better not to ask." And IT! Just coming in and doing updates and probably noticing the computers were unused but just...keeping their head down?

Wow.

[minoanmiss]

This is an amazing chronicle. Oh my wow.

[cesy]

I loved reading this

[vass]

I did work experience in the music library at my university, and it was nothing like this because it was a more or less functional workplace. I wasn't allowed to actually catalogue, but they let me enter the new acquisitions into the catalogue, and do shelf-reads and so forth.

I have, however, met Jean, and I'm a little amazed at all the people in your comments who have not encountered her yet. There are so many of her. (Mine was part of a local environmental activist group whose chief focus was making sure that rubbish bins were collected from the REAR LANE of each street, NOT THE FRONT, as this would permit the garbage collectors to use ergonomic garbage trucks so they wouldn't get workplace injuries and could work faster be unsightly. She and another group member went on patrol throughout the neighbourhood every Sunday night to make sure the bins were in the right places. Unlike your Jean, mine was also a very kind and conscientious person who had many friends and a deep concern for fairness. She was just also... like that.)

Do not try this on catalogers, that’s my advice.

Well, yeah. They are, by training and job description, pedants who will split 8 digits worth of hairs over where exactly an item belongs. (And I think that is very cool of them.) Jean was clearly suffering from hubris, among other conditions.

And if we went into the public part of the library while working we’d be fired, another Jean Rule.

Okay, I have to ask. We don't have work-study here, so I'm unfamiliar with the rules. What... happens if you get fired from your work-study job? Are you allowed to apply for another one, or is that it? Was there a possible scenario in which you could have explained to the next interviewer that you were fired from your last work-study job for touching your own hair?

[lknomad]

Was this the same library where I worked?

[mtl]

I am already imagining this amazing, fascinating YA fantasy story with this setting.

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you.

It’s a lucky day when I see a notice that you’ve posted.

Valuable life lessons for sure

[copracat]

Well, Libraries right?

[soupytwist]

I would 1000000% read any novel you wrote, but the one based on this would be EPIC. Wow.

[coyotegestalt]

This is amazing and beautiful, thank you for sharing it.
As a trainee cataloger, I have to admit, yes, we really are like that, too. <3

[celli]

You have a unique ability to make me boggle, laugh, and facepalm at the same time. Oh my GOD.

[runpunkrun]

oh my god

[j00j]

This is glorious. I've spent most of my life working as higher ed staff, much of it in library or library-adjacent jobs and it's such a wonderfully concentrated version of all the bizarre, petty shit that can happen when people don't know how to manage and dysfunction is allowed to fester for years. Beautiful. But also I'm so sorry you and all the other work studies had to deal with that. As you said,at least you learned to deal with difficult people!

[kellyfaboo]

One of my goals in life is to not interact with Catalogers. No offense to catalogers, but the devotion to specificity and completeness that makes catalogers really good at their job, can make them deeply unhappy people. The cataloger who would actually help out was fighting the good fight against bitterness. I hope they won.

Because the world does not really appreciate or support a devotion to specificity and completeness outside of certain contexts.

Of course, Jean seems to have been a bit unhappy herself. The world raced past her knowledge and control and her only recourse was a pitched battle against progress. And space allocation, apparently.

[metawidget]

This is delightful reading and I had a good chuckle (on mute) reading while lightly monitoring a very dry accounting motion at an online union meeting.

[eleanorjane]

My kudos to you on your patience! I would have murdered Jean with her own typewriter in about three days, I think.

[schneefink]

When she read through this, she said, “Yes, this it true, but it ... doesn’t really capture how weird it all was.”
Uh-oh...

[mific]

I love how you and your fellow work-study got sucked into this surreal alternate reality warped by Jean's personality and the idiosyncrasies of libraries. And how you found ways to manage it and survive.

[reginagiraffe]

As usual, your story was a joy to read.

[vickita]

Daaaaamn. I just..... I have so many thoughts. Like, the old saying about how university politics are so cutthroat because the stakes are so low. And man, I bet they had a par-TAY when poor old Jean retired. And Jean reminds me of the Graphic Designer of DOOOOOOM I used to have to deal with at The Day Job, and the punch line to that is I am now in sorta-kinda the same place TGOD was in back when she made my life hell, and there are days when I actually think I owe her an apology, lol.

But I gotta share: when I was a freshman physics major, my first job on campus was working in the library in the (at least semi-world famous) History of Science collection. They had received a gift of the papers and book collection that belonged to the guy the physics building was named after, who had recently passed away.

It was my job to take the stacks of cards that had been generated for the books in his collection and go through the card catalogue (I am old enough that it was still in use, before computers were common in libraries), looking to see what items we already had, how many copies, etc. I don't remember exactly what I was supposed to do when I found them, probably make notes on the cards of call numbers, etc.

It was a temp job, done when we had gone through the collection, not nearly so memorable! But the lady I worked for was nice, and I got to see their first edition Galileo. (It was Galileo's copy, it had notes written in the margin in his hand.) (They actually have a complete set of Galileo first editions now, and several of them were his copies, but at the time it was just the one, and it blew my freshman mind.)

Cheesecake wars?

[kathmandu]

The Publishing work-study job sounds really interesting too.

[petra]

I adore the way you write about the world.

[kore]

WOW

[green_grrl]

This looks like a Terry Gilliam movie in my mind’s eye.

[monkey5s]

Having worked over 33 years in a small-town public library, I recognize all of these characters, even with our differing ecological structure of work life (I will confess to exhibiting certain traits of more than one of these characers, myself). As usual, your story here is superbly rendered, even without quite making the extreme weirdness clear.

And I, too, would LOVE to read the novelization of this.