Bernard! Bernard! Bernard look! Look Bernard! Bernard!
MANNY!
One of the best jobs I ever had was night shift stocker at a grocery store. I’d clock in as the store was closing and would clock out about an hour after it opened. I’d get stoned out of my mind, listen to music or audio books the whole time and restock cereal and stuff.
My job now is pretty cushy now, but I do reminisce when I didn’t have to think about work during off hours.
Internet Archive?
I’m guessing this is a common thought or feeling for most in a dissonant corporate world.
So you want to become a librarian?
SSSHHHH not so loud or i’m gonna have to ask you to leave
^Great job. I’ll keep it down.^
I want to be a bookstore employee
If I could organize the arkane library daily with my current salary, I would be happy
I found a nice quiet job in a lab that’s like this. No one fucks with me, some days I’m completely by myself, but the one drawback I’ve discovered is I find myself getting stuck in my own head a lot. Sometimes I have to go find something or someone to distract me.
Yeah, being alone on the job is not necesarily great. I have worked in a small data center for a large company for like 15 years now. I am the only one in the building many days but it gets quite lonely and boring.
Librarians require a master’s and make like $34k a year.
The fuck you need a master’s for? The dewy decimal system ain’t that hard. 🤨
Because it’s meant to be the case that a librarian can help me if I need to join a correlation between etchings of revolutionary France and the poetry of William Blake
Because most people who work at the library aren’t librarians. Librarians maintain and manage a collection, set up the database, etc etc.
You certainly don’t need a masters just to do that.
Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don’t you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren’t?
Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.
It’s really much more broad than “Someone who works at the local library”
Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living… untill I saw the effort required and the pay.
Your library experience was very different from mine. We mostly just told people how to sign up for the wait list for 50 Shades of gray, what programs we did for the kids, and putting away the books everyone left everywhere.
The pay is what scared me away. Branch Manager, highest position I interacted with, couldn’t afford their own transportation, and was going through their second green card marriage for money because they were desperate. Had 2 Masters.
A lot of jobs are easy on a day-to-day basis, but get hard every once in a while when some edge case comes up and you’ve gotta have a breadth of background knowledge of the field to handle it effectively. It’s why AI seems so useful to middle managers who don’t realize that edge cases exist; their employees can handle them without issue, but AI spits out total garbage and calls it done. I’d imagine librarians are indeed dealing with people looking for the latest fad book more often than not, but they still have to be prepared for the person coming in wanting to know all about insect phylogeny.
How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can’t know about everything. You’d just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?
Research skills that you acquire during your master’s (incl. but not limited to, talking to other experts)
You can talk with other experts without having master’s
Sure, you can ask 10 experts, and get 11 opinions.
Researching books, authors, subjects, and determining which ones are appropriate and which ones aren’t is complex stuff.
You would, for example, research the authors prior publishing history of books and journal articles, read peer reviews of their articles, check their references, research the history of the authors of their references ECT to build an idea of what sort of author you’re dealing with. Do they know their stuff, or are they just a book mill? Is any of the subject matter contradictory, controversial, out of date, or incomplete. Repeat for 30 books on the same subject to find the most comprehensive work for your collection.
Just to check - do you know that they do this, or do you think that’s the way it’s best done? - Because that is a lot of work and you’d need a lot of librarians
part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they’re worth acquiring for the collection. So, you’d look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there’s anything they’d suggest. You research the author, find out if they’re involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.
Yes, that sounds trivial, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.
I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.
“Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.
You don’t but it does gatekeep the position. Helps your job security…
Think museum curator, not book warehouse owner. They have to make complex decisions involving knowledge about knowledge.
does it have to be a masters in librarian? ive got this engineering degree i wouldnt mind using for something a little less corporate.
Yup. MLS or MLIS.
Yes, but you can work in a library without being a librarian. Check out code4lib. It’s a (free online) techie conference with associated slack channel, and it’s for folks that, roughly, code for libraries. Tbh, I think the techie route to working in a library is easier than the master’s degree. Source: engineering undergrad, have my mslis, work in a library, current position doesn’t require an mslis.
yea its a requirement for libraries, Universities might be more competitive, since you likely need another area of expertise to complement your resume to.
I’m 40 and getting my massage therapy license out of nowhere. Similar line of thinking.
I’ve heard that has a time table before your hands wear out. Is that true?
Probably! We’ll see! I’ve read there are ways to minimize the strain, e.g. using your forearms and elbows. But I start classes in three weeks. I don’t think it’ll take me into old age, but if I can charge $90ish starting out per 60-minute massage, then increase a bit as I go, I should be able to get at least a few solid years out of it/my body. It’s a hail mary, Lord knows there are potential downsides. 🤞
make sure you keep your shit stretched and use what you learn on your own forearms / wrists / hands
RMTs often work alongside physiotherapists in a practice. If that’s where you end up, there might be a perk of after-hours PT sessions to keep your joints in shape. If not, then engaging the services of a physiotherapist a couple times a year can definitely help.
You could go check for bugs in tea shipments…
I’ve climbed the corporate ladder and traveled all over the world until I got near the top where the nepotism is thick. Said ‘fuck that’ and bailed out early.
New plan: “Work for myself.” Took me a decade to get here because of little things like health care and capital.
Been on my own for almost 2 years now and it is glorious.
I had the job shelving books. I’d show up in a button-up shirt and slacks and I could shove all day with no problem at all. No one would bother me. I’d show up in ripped jeans, a Metallica t-shirt, and 4 years since my last haircut and people would ask me for help every moment of the day. Libraries are weird.
Good example of outfits sending signals.
Slacks and a button-up probably made you look like management just out picking up slack, and people subconsciously left you alone - “oh, they’re probably really busy with management stuff and also had to go shelve books… I’ll leave them alone”
Casual clothes in contrast would have signalled “worker” - “I’ll just go ask that person, it’s not like they’re doing anything important, they’re just shelving books!”
It probably didn’t help that I was a 17-year-old that looked like I was in my late twenties.
Buddy of mine was a night janitor during college. I had to help him a few times, and it wasn’t a bad gig, run around and vacuum, mop some stuff, take out the trash. Dude listened to music the whole time and basically never saw anyone. Sometimes I kinda want to quit doing software just to do night janitoring.
My bro is a dishie and never changed jobs once. I always used to try and push him to study or get into a career and would bang on about having a ‘respectable job’ - now im fantasising about listening to music while washing dishes all day
Yeah, at times just having a nice simpler job sounds nice. Not needing to deal with stupid error messages and poorly documented libraries.
Why did you need to help him?
He was one of 2 people that would clean like 4 buildings. Sometimes the other person wouldn’t show up (or one time his boss was arrested and given 22 years) and sometimes he’d call me to be the other janitor (sometimes he’d just do the job solo and keep the extra cash).
And you can! Chase the dream!
While it was kinda fun “mindless” work, I just bought a house and need my software developer pay to keep the house.
You can be the nighttime janitor and do software development. Dual employment
During my first “job,” I was too young to be legally employed, so I volunteered at a library with my mom. Initially I worked in one of the back rooms, hidden from the public, helping to scan and sort books put in the return bins. (I discovered several great books by seeing them come back; among them were Dogsbody, Lovely Bones, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Those are listed alphabetically by title and that wasn’t even by design!)
After I volunteered long enough, I was deemed sufficiently experienced to put books on the shelves in the stacks. I was titled a “page” and proudly announced that while attending a LAN party. One of the other attendees of said party said “and if you do that long enough maybe you’ll become a full book!” I laughed quite heartily.
If you’ve never read anything else I wrote here, the post above will probably tell you everything you could possibly want to know about me.
So have you made it to a chapter of your own? :3
Ha!
Man, my first real job was at the library as a student page. That job fucking rocked so much and I wish I could have stayed there forever.
I got to shelve books, play with microfilm and microfiche, and listen to my CDs all day. It was the best job ever.
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almost all my friends dream of this. ideally, communes start with a community buying land and building infrastructure, which gets pricier each day 😌 I’ll settle for an RV at this point
