Rambling about my career

It's not always easy to tell in reading this blog, but I really do like working in a public library. Choosing public was a conscious decision I made back in library school. I had fresh memories of how stultifying I had found life at college with such a small community of adults and "college-age" students. I remember feeling, in my second semester of senior year, as if I were starving for interaction with children and/or old people. Odd, since I had (and have) no interest in a career in dealing with rugrats or the elderly on a daily basis. I was tired of the same narrow worldview, though. Face it: most 20-year-olds, especially those at a small private college, do not do a lot of anything beyond belly-button gazing.

Anyway, a year later as I prepared to graduate with a Master's, that feeling was fresh, and I didn't want to 'lock myself up' in academia. Several professors knew of my interest in cataloging and told me that if that was where I wanted to go, I should drop public libraries and head directly--without passing Go or collecting $200--to a university or college library. My work-study job was in the archives department in the library at my university. It was an...interesting...experience. The work was fabulous (and beyond easy!), but my supervisors....
OH
MY
GOD!Crazy-time. Stereotype-time. Oy.

{I hasten to add that I know a lot of normal, sensible academic librarians for whom I have nothing but respect, two of whom share the same family tree as I do. But, I'm not interested, just as they have NO interest in working with the broader public.}

In any case, the profs were right: public libraries, especially small ones--the ones I was interested in, as I have no interest in joining a union--don't hire catalogers. They hire "general services" librarians. After 20 years, I now spend a few moments every day counting my blessings that I am doing what I love in a public library!

So. Why do I love public libraries? The main reason is because you literally never know what you'll get next: a wailing baby, a deaf and cranky old woman, someone wearing a mink and arguing about 40 cents in fines, members of the armed forces on leave, Mormons on their year-long missions, a teenager and her boyfriend...oh, but let's NOT go there! :-)

Some of our regulars are totally annoying, but the vast majority are interesting people:

• There is a gentleman who uses our public computers upstairs for about 2 hours every morning. He brings his own headphones (though I think he used to borrow a pair from us) and spends the entire time at an online teaching site. He is, I think, learning English, online. This has been going on for about three months. He never speaks to anyone, he never practices out loud, but he does smile if he catches our eye as we walk past.


• There is another guy using a different computer upstairs everyday. I think his mission is to watch EVERYTHING on YouTube. He is, literally, online for 5 or 6 hours a day. Since the computer he uses is right next to the door into the break room, he's hard to miss (and it's hard to miss what he's doing, too).
  
• There is a high school girl who has been using our library for at least 7 years. She is what my mother would call "a little slow" but up until recently I'm not sure she has been pigeon-holed by the school system. They are tracking her now, and trying to provide some life-skills classes for her. She used to come in and print off gabillions of coloring pages; she is actually pretty much responsible for our push to install printer controls on the internet computers. The other problem, alongside the printing, is that she would be in the library ALL DAY in the summer, alone: no parents, nada. And speaking of that, her parents don't really speak English, nor did she when she first started coming. She was one of those little girls who is an easy target: you can clearly see her getting pregnant at 13. She did avoid that, but she's not out of the woods yet.
  
• One of the unintentionally funniest women who uses the library has been coming for probably five years now. She is a real honest-to-God dingbat. My first interaction with her was when she was learning to use the internet, and paying her bills online. In the library. OK, weird, relatively unsafe, and she's not very bright: virtually announcing her PIN to the universe over the loudspeaker. Actually, it's not her intelligence I question so much as the aura of way too many tranquilizers in her system. We have constant issues with her checking out too many movies, returning them late, not bringing money for her fines, having trouble with the internet (still).... My favorite story related to her is when she told me I looked like one of the librarians at her 'old library' in a suburb of the Big City nearby and asked me if I'd ever worked there. No, I told her. "Are you sure?" she asked. Yeah, pretty sure I'd remember!
  
• My favorite kids are the those of a couple from our church. There are four kids in the family. The oldest kids are 4, the youngest is just about 2. The oldest are triplets, and they are absolutely a riot, in every sense. Cute as can be, they usually come in with "Gamma," who brings them to use the games on the kids computers (they don't have games at home). Gamma is kept busy helping, admiring, talking, shushing, calming...for the strictly enforced half hour they are allowed. And she smiles all the time. Gotta love it.
  
• Then there's the Smelly Guy. The less said about him the better. He smells. Really, really, a lot. If we had more patrons like him, I'd totally rethink this whole Public Library thing. This is not the usual "living out of doors, homeless, fireplace/B.O." thing. It's MUCH much worse and completely indescribable.


• We used to see a guy who would come in every single night. This was about ten years ago. He and his wife lived about two blocks away, and he would come over and search for songs he liked and then request the CDs so he could do the unmentionable thing that people do with CDs from libraries (in the days before downloading). This went on until about six years ago when, due to a confluence of reasons including the purchase of a computer of his own, he found another source for music. He could be really annoying about the CDs, but I always found him fascinating to talk to.

I can't tell you the number of people I have helped find information on medical issues when their doctor had been less-than-helpful after diagnosing them, nor can I number the people who arrive at the library in mid-crisis--usually family crisis--needing books on how to get an order of protection, how to get their ex-spouse to allow them access to the kids, what to do about the recent discovery of sexual abuse of their child, how to avoid getting evicted....

I've typed term papers that were due "TOMORROW and the computer just deleted it all!" and it's closing time. I've played Legos with five-year-olds, painted with pudding with two-year-olds, and made knot-necklaces with teenagers. I've delivered armloads of books to shut-ins (for THREE YEARS!!!), I've found the magazines I left in the door of one woman's house exactly where I left them--only to read her obit in the paper the following week: "found dead in her house." There have been innumerable big-eyed children whose parents had "gotten lost in the library." I have been called a bitch by people from age 13 to age 50. I've called the police only four or five times that I remember, and been fortunate enough never to have had to call the ambulance.

People, by and large, make me smile. Sometimes, they don't know how much I've enjoyed my interaction with them. Sometimes, I want to thump them over the head and say, "What are you THINKING?!" Mostly, though, I just enjoy the display of humanity and am glad I get to be around them.