Recently, a colleague of mine went to a daylong seminar on a variety of topics about our jobs in the library.
I chose not to attend because I’d really rather not get up at 5 am to meet my carpoolers at the library at 6:30, drive an hour and a half to an 8-hour gathering of strangers, where I’ll have to sit and listen to speakers I don’t know, talk about things I don’t care about. I can do that from the comfort of my own library, with a computer in front of me that doubles as a toy to play with while they’re blathering on and on. AND I can sleep in. Until 7:30, that is.
So, when my colleague returned the next day, I asked her how the seminar went.
Note to self: next time, don’t ask.
Not only did she love the seminar, but she said one of the speakers in particular rejuvenated her interest in her own career.
Wow. That’s a powerful speaker. I was wondering if it’s possible that she might have been sitting in the far back and misunderstood the actual spoken words. She assured me she did not.
What she did say was that this speaker likened our jobs to saving the world.
I kid you not.
The phrase used was “perpetuate society”, in that we provide answers and pathways to answers that improve the civilized world we live in. We assist doctors diagnosing patients, we assist scientists in finding discoveries, we assist students in learning and going on to do any number of immeasurable things, and on top of that, we provide endless opportunities for education and entertainment to the masses.
Lofty words. Too bad it’s a bunch of crap.
I’m all for pride in our jobs, but this is so blatantly condescending that I can hardly swallow it, and that’s not just because I’m bitter and jaded. It’s because this speaker obviously hadn’t worked a reference shift in a long, long time.
We perpetuate society? Okay, let’s examine this.
Last week I helped a woman find legal information about giving up custody of her teenage daughter, which she whispered to me with her teenage daughter standing five feet away, looking terrified. Specifically, she wanted to find out how to make her daughter a ward of the state temporarily, until she had more money, and then she’d take her daughter back. There were three younger kids bouncing around her feet, calling her “Mama”, but she made no mention of giving up the younger kids. Now, I’m sure that society is going to be much better off if this woman has fewer children, but the damage to the younger kids who would think their mother might one day get rid of them too is tragic, not to mention the destruction to the teen daughter who would somehow have to live her fragile life knowing that her mother gave her up, but not her younger siblings. That can only be good for society, yes? Oh, I was proud to take part in that debacle. What exactly do you hope for?
I spent two days assisting a lady I despise (because she had the balls to protest a poster we had up that contained Spanish words on it, even though it was mostly English) print off idiotic Internet jokes people had emailed to her, because she didn’t know how to highlight, cut and paste them into a document. These jokes were very funny to her and she wanted to print one of them and frame it. Yes, this too is an excellent example of perpetuating the mindless society we have become.
The humpback whales that swam into a whale-free zone in California and nearly died inspired another encounter. One of our regular pests came in with two pages of questions she wanted answered about the whales, such as “Why did they go there?”, “Was the mother protecting the baby from a predator?”, “Did they know they were lost?”, and my favorite, “Were they hoping for human help getting them back on course?” With as little sarcasm as I could muster, I said, “I’m not really sure the whales would answer if we asked them these questions.” She did not get it. She wanted me to contact the people in charge of the whales and ask them. The people in charge of the whales? I gave her a few phone numbers, printed about five articles about whale behavior and the known facts surrounding this particular event, and tried again to explain that there were probably no answers to her questions because there was no way to know. It took about a half-hour to make her understand that there weren’t going to be answers about what the whales were thinking or how they felt. She was greatly disappointed. I’m quite certain that if I had made a gigantic load of shit up about the whales, she would’ve been quite pleased. For instance, I might have said that I discovered an article that claimed a rogue band of seals were harassing and tormenting the whales, chasing them clear up the Baja Peninsula to the San Francisco Bay, where they finally found safety in the fresh water. The crowds of humans, which the whales were hoping for, scared off the marauding seals, and when it was safe to return to the ocean, the whales slipped back and eluded the gang of seals. Our crazy patron would’ve been quite happy with this story. Instead I told the truth and she went away upset. This, I’m sure, improved the very state of our world because crazy ladies who are curious about whales must be silenced.
A very malodorous old man visits often, notably last week, wanting access to a computer so that he can research his family tree, only what he does is search the online listed phone records of everyone in the country with his last name. I have no idea if he goes home and calls them all, wanting to know if he’s related to them, but why else would he compile this information? Each visit is to target another geographical area, and he’ll ask me to help him search for all of the people with the last name Bianchi in Washington. It takes him hours to print out the list of names, but he does it and takes them home. I’m guessing that there are hundreds of people with his last name (or variants of the spelling of his last name) who have been pissed off with a rambling and uninvited phone call from a strange guy on the other side of the country, wondering if they’re related just because their last names are the same. Yes, I’m sure that improves the quality of many lives and to have participated is a high point in my career.
And while I’m sure that crafts and cookbooks make people happy, it certainly doesn’t take a PhD to hand out knitting books, place a hold for Sylvia Browne’s latest farce, or finding how-to home repair books with lots of pictures for the guy who is illiterate. My only proud moments last week occurred when I helped a man in a wheelchair find movies on learning to play guitar, and a middle-aged woman who needed a few sex aid manuals. Those are the only two I can tenuously say were positive experiences and might have contributed to some enlightenment.
Do I believe I provide a service to the community? You bet.
Do I believe it requires skill or higher education? Absolutely not.
Do I do it because I need to feel like I’m somehow important, riding on the coattails of people who actually accomplish great things? Hell no.
I do it because it’s fun. People amuse me. Sometimes I get to be creative, and other times I get to spend lots of other people’s money on books I want to read and add to our collection. Perhaps if you are a librarian in a medical library or a university library, things might be a bit different. My library, which is a medium-sized suburban public library, has never owned the kind of collection that could one day lead someone to the cure for Parkinson’s Disease or cancer. Anyone who actually buys into the concept that we can somehow take credit for all the great that happens in the world today is delusional. Perhaps one librarian in a million might contribute to something great, but if we’re sitting around trying to validate our jobs using concepts so lofty as this, then we really do belong in another field.
This post isn’t to diminish the egos of librarians everywhere, or to shatter some illusion the world has about the place of librarians in society. Our patrons determine our place in their world, and in a way that does perpetuates society, but it’s not always for the better.
Sometimes it’s just to give MySpace a larger extended network of users, or to give an out-of-work simpleton a place to spend his time until his Unemployment benefits run out.
Sometimes it’s to provide recipes, driving directions, needlework patterns, popular fiction novels, and the entire first season of “Gray’s Anatomy” to average joes.
And that’s good enough for me.
I chose not to attend because I’d really rather not get up at 5 am to meet my carpoolers at the library at 6:30, drive an hour and a half to an 8-hour gathering of strangers, where I’ll have to sit and listen to speakers I don’t know, talk about things I don’t care about. I can do that from the comfort of my own library, with a computer in front of me that doubles as a toy to play with while they’re blathering on and on. AND I can sleep in. Until 7:30, that is.
So, when my colleague returned the next day, I asked her how the seminar went.
Note to self: next time, don’t ask.
Not only did she love the seminar, but she said one of the speakers in particular rejuvenated her interest in her own career.
Wow. That’s a powerful speaker. I was wondering if it’s possible that she might have been sitting in the far back and misunderstood the actual spoken words. She assured me she did not.
What she did say was that this speaker likened our jobs to saving the world.
I kid you not.
The phrase used was “perpetuate society”, in that we provide answers and pathways to answers that improve the civilized world we live in. We assist doctors diagnosing patients, we assist scientists in finding discoveries, we assist students in learning and going on to do any number of immeasurable things, and on top of that, we provide endless opportunities for education and entertainment to the masses.
Lofty words. Too bad it’s a bunch of crap.
I’m all for pride in our jobs, but this is so blatantly condescending that I can hardly swallow it, and that’s not just because I’m bitter and jaded. It’s because this speaker obviously hadn’t worked a reference shift in a long, long time.
We perpetuate society? Okay, let’s examine this.
Last week I helped a woman find legal information about giving up custody of her teenage daughter, which she whispered to me with her teenage daughter standing five feet away, looking terrified. Specifically, she wanted to find out how to make her daughter a ward of the state temporarily, until she had more money, and then she’d take her daughter back. There were three younger kids bouncing around her feet, calling her “Mama”, but she made no mention of giving up the younger kids. Now, I’m sure that society is going to be much better off if this woman has fewer children, but the damage to the younger kids who would think their mother might one day get rid of them too is tragic, not to mention the destruction to the teen daughter who would somehow have to live her fragile life knowing that her mother gave her up, but not her younger siblings. That can only be good for society, yes? Oh, I was proud to take part in that debacle. What exactly do you hope for?
I spent two days assisting a lady I despise (because she had the balls to protest a poster we had up that contained Spanish words on it, even though it was mostly English) print off idiotic Internet jokes people had emailed to her, because she didn’t know how to highlight, cut and paste them into a document. These jokes were very funny to her and she wanted to print one of them and frame it. Yes, this too is an excellent example of perpetuating the mindless society we have become.
The humpback whales that swam into a whale-free zone in California and nearly died inspired another encounter. One of our regular pests came in with two pages of questions she wanted answered about the whales, such as “Why did they go there?”, “Was the mother protecting the baby from a predator?”, “Did they know they were lost?”, and my favorite, “Were they hoping for human help getting them back on course?” With as little sarcasm as I could muster, I said, “I’m not really sure the whales would answer if we asked them these questions.” She did not get it. She wanted me to contact the people in charge of the whales and ask them. The people in charge of the whales? I gave her a few phone numbers, printed about five articles about whale behavior and the known facts surrounding this particular event, and tried again to explain that there were probably no answers to her questions because there was no way to know. It took about a half-hour to make her understand that there weren’t going to be answers about what the whales were thinking or how they felt. She was greatly disappointed. I’m quite certain that if I had made a gigantic load of shit up about the whales, she would’ve been quite pleased. For instance, I might have said that I discovered an article that claimed a rogue band of seals were harassing and tormenting the whales, chasing them clear up the Baja Peninsula to the San Francisco Bay, where they finally found safety in the fresh water. The crowds of humans, which the whales were hoping for, scared off the marauding seals, and when it was safe to return to the ocean, the whales slipped back and eluded the gang of seals. Our crazy patron would’ve been quite happy with this story. Instead I told the truth and she went away upset. This, I’m sure, improved the very state of our world because crazy ladies who are curious about whales must be silenced.
A very malodorous old man visits often, notably last week, wanting access to a computer so that he can research his family tree, only what he does is search the online listed phone records of everyone in the country with his last name. I have no idea if he goes home and calls them all, wanting to know if he’s related to them, but why else would he compile this information? Each visit is to target another geographical area, and he’ll ask me to help him search for all of the people with the last name Bianchi in Washington. It takes him hours to print out the list of names, but he does it and takes them home. I’m guessing that there are hundreds of people with his last name (or variants of the spelling of his last name) who have been pissed off with a rambling and uninvited phone call from a strange guy on the other side of the country, wondering if they’re related just because their last names are the same. Yes, I’m sure that improves the quality of many lives and to have participated is a high point in my career.
And while I’m sure that crafts and cookbooks make people happy, it certainly doesn’t take a PhD to hand out knitting books, place a hold for Sylvia Browne’s latest farce, or finding how-to home repair books with lots of pictures for the guy who is illiterate. My only proud moments last week occurred when I helped a man in a wheelchair find movies on learning to play guitar, and a middle-aged woman who needed a few sex aid manuals. Those are the only two I can tenuously say were positive experiences and might have contributed to some enlightenment.
Do I believe I provide a service to the community? You bet.
Do I believe it requires skill or higher education? Absolutely not.
Do I do it because I need to feel like I’m somehow important, riding on the coattails of people who actually accomplish great things? Hell no.
I do it because it’s fun. People amuse me. Sometimes I get to be creative, and other times I get to spend lots of other people’s money on books I want to read and add to our collection. Perhaps if you are a librarian in a medical library or a university library, things might be a bit different. My library, which is a medium-sized suburban public library, has never owned the kind of collection that could one day lead someone to the cure for Parkinson’s Disease or cancer. Anyone who actually buys into the concept that we can somehow take credit for all the great that happens in the world today is delusional. Perhaps one librarian in a million might contribute to something great, but if we’re sitting around trying to validate our jobs using concepts so lofty as this, then we really do belong in another field.
This post isn’t to diminish the egos of librarians everywhere, or to shatter some illusion the world has about the place of librarians in society. Our patrons determine our place in their world, and in a way that does perpetuates society, but it’s not always for the better.
Sometimes it’s just to give MySpace a larger extended network of users, or to give an out-of-work simpleton a place to spend his time until his Unemployment benefits run out.
Sometimes it’s to provide recipes, driving directions, needlework patterns, popular fiction novels, and the entire first season of “Gray’s Anatomy” to average joes.
And that’s good enough for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment