A day in the life of a librarian.
An asshole that I once dated used to tell me, “you have to make your own fun.” Usually he would trot that one out when I was hanging around with his douchenozzle friends, who were inevitably playing darts or snorting coke—two pasttimes that are not high on my list of enjoyable things to do. You can hurt someone playing darts, and coke is for skinny girls with shiny, cameltoe-inducing leggings, bad skin, and cold sores. But in my advanced age, thirteen years later, I realize that maybe there’s something there, and I now make my own fun while at work in the following ways:
1. Mocking the head of maintenance’s love of the Chicago Cubs. Wait until September? Yeah, I’m sure they will blow their lead by then. CUBS does stand for Completely Useless By September. GOAT! GOAT! GOAT!
2. Mocking people who make stupid errors in OCLC WorldCat records. It’s so easy when you can just hover your mouse pointer over the 040 field and see who’s who. This is one of the choicest bits of wisdom I pass on to my cataloging students every semester: how to mock people for making nasty cataloging errors.
I edited a record on OCLC this morning and replaced it, due to a note that said “Illustration is an advertisment.” FYI, library with OCLC symbol ON8, per AACR 2.5C1, you should “disregard illustrated title pages and minor illustrations.” That means advertisements. Don’t make me drive up there to Joliet and smack you with my LCRI binder (or ask you, in the rudest possible way, “WHO TAUGHT YOU CATALOGING, ANYWAY? AND DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING?”).
3. Making sure that any hot tickets that I send to Technology or Maintenance are amusing. Ex:
customer reporter a mold smell in the lobby. I cannot smell it, but someone with better knowledge of mold smells than myself might want to come over and take a whiff.
I didn’t smell mold that day, only burnt bagels from the cafe.
