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
Or: is there a job… where I can just live my life? Like, spend time with friends and doing hobbies and still getting paid?
You mean… you want to live your life and not add value to someone else’s wallet?
I for one love to work for soulless schmucks who profit from my labor and make the tough decisions like not giving raises this year.
“3/5 - Meets Expectations”
Do what you love except hold a camera in your offhand and shout “bro bro honestly like actually what just happened!? Like and subscribe!” Every 30 seconds.
Get independently wealthy. Can you marry someone rich?
Hey wait a minute! I did not said i wanted to meet a woman
Wealthy investor.
That’s just called “being rich.” Work duties do include disenfranchizing the poor, with quarterly reviews by peers in the Illuminati though.
So not quite as chill as you might hope from “having no logical fears or needs”.
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.
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.
So have you made it to a chapter of your own? :3
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Why did you need to help him?
me at 50 after the latest round of cutbacks and layoffs, “are there still jobs that will allow me to pay my bills?”
Me after surviving the layoffs, great all my bosses are gone it’s going to be months if not an entire year before they notice me again. Time to do the bare minimum!
My company got purchased and then the purchasing company got purchased by a huge west coast tech giant. Everybody from the original company got reassigned to new teams and we all ended up with new bosses who had no idea who we were or why we were even there. I had a very enjoyable six months “working” from home doing absolutely nothing before I was laid off. I even got a severance package about equivalent to a year’s salary for the first (and presumably last) time in my career.
Maybe I’m still too young. Early 30’s and asking a lot of questions about “why did we have a restructuring and layoffs if we had a record year for financials?” Not getting any answers of course, but I sure am getting a lot of information. Also getting to be the voice of all my coworkers. Literally all of them. We all hate it.
Be the change you want to see. If you are the voice of your coworkers. U n I o n I z e
I had a 25-year career as a programmer, ending up making nearly $200K a year. Now I’m a school bus driver making about $30K, although fortunately that also includes subsidized (and really good) health insurance. I’m also fortunate because I already own a small house outright and was able to save a good bit when I was making good money. I quit programming (read: was laid off) just before the AI “revolution” so I’m thankful that I’ve missed all that bullshit.
Maybe I’ll be able to get back into coding after all the AI slop fails catastrophically and there’s nobody left in the industry who still knows how to actually code, but I don’t have my hopes up for that. Corporate bullshit is simply too strong for catastrophic failure to be a real problem.
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.
If I could organize the arkane library daily with my current salary, I would be happy
at least once a month i’ll text my friend: i’m so tired of working, let’s just live in the woods! as i begrudgingly get ready for my shift.
I dunno I thought I wanted this and took a job at a datacenter
Some days I don’t even interact with another human
5 years into this and it’s completely killed my social skills and therefore social life, im thinking about moving on for this reason actually
If it pays ok, why not volunteer?
You get to socialise, you get to feel a part of your community, you get to feel like you’re making a difference, etc.
I don’t know why but the hermit nature of the job leaks into my real life and I tend to not want to socialize outside of work either
It’s all been a slow burn in this way
Im in the same boat. Perpetual screen time is fine if you have colleagues next to you that you can shoot the shit with. Without them? Brain becomes a spongey moss
It’s not just screen time in my case. Alone in the datacenter at night is like some liminal space and it feels like there is something inherently unhealthy standing amongst the whirring server racks. Even with hearing protection it just drives a guy mad in a way
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. 🤞
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.
make sure you keep your shit stretched and use what you learn on your own forearms / wrists / hands
IT security is like that. It’s really boring until it isn’t.
Make note of the Crowdstrike update schedule, and book holidays immediately afterwards
If you do your job right, nobody will know you did anything at all.
And management will subsequently ask you why your position shouldn’t be terminated, as you’re clearly not contributing anything.
Luckily I report directly to the CISO.
“Why is your finger in that dam? You’re clearly just standing there doing nothing.”
The good(ish) news is that black hats are very skilled at their jobs. IT Security more often needs to justify their fuck-ups than their excessive competency.
They don’t ask in the year of our lord.
Yeah, feel the same since the great slopification of the internet and also my job…
