library b*tch
Many moons ago, I had the misfortune to be a librarian, which is surprisingly even more boring than most people can imagine.

We used to get lots of kiddies in for work experience, most of them thinking ‘I like books, I’ll work in a library’, little realising that contrary to popular opinion, the staff didn’t spend all their time lolling at their desks with a book in their hands, but running round returning, shelving and re-ordering books, and helping punters find titles such as ‘A field guide to pumpkin varieties’ or ‘Help – my husband wears my clothes’*.

Consequently, most of the grommets were slightly pissed off to find they had to fill their days stacking books or re-ordering them according to the Dewey Decimal System, and by about day three we would usually find them hidden up the back in the 900 aisle (history and geography, in case you wondered) with a magazine, or tucked up in the Wendy house* trying to get some shut eye

Until Sally came along, a girl so obnoxious she made Paris Hilton look like Nelson Mandela. This girl took a rather ‘pro-active’ approach to her work experience. Rather than listening, watching and learning the somewhat mundane trade, she decided after about two hours of being there that she new better than everyone combined and did not hesitate in informing us at all intervals, vociferously.

While I or another staff member was serving a customer, she would jump in with her own two cents, talking over the top of us, which either led to her sending the person off in the completely wrong direction, or more often than not, leading to an argument where one of us would angrily tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, and the customer would wonder what had caused their local library to become such a hotbed of internal conflict and disagreement.

By day three we all despised her, the final straw being me catching her trying to observe and write down the safe combination as someone else put away our (albeit modest) day’s takings.

So we expelled her from the premises. Yes, we expelled someone from work experience. In a library.

I have no idea, but I like to think little Sally went on to a stellar career in sanitation management or perhaps as a prison officer . However since she was probably such an officious little know-it-all she probably ended up in human resources.

*ps absolutely true book title

*pps you wouldn’t have found me anywhere near that Wendy house – more than once an overexcited child had left a ‘deposit’ in there for one of us to clean up…

*pps Length? She was only there three days – long enough to piss me off good and proper though.
(blu-k, Fri 11 May 2007, 2:03, Reply)