Realizations

It has become increasingly evident to me that I am in the wrong field. By “field” I refer to librarianship, in particular, reference service. I do not like working with people (hence the title of this blog); I do not enjoy helping people figure things out, nor do I enjoy answering their questions, helping them find information, or explaining things in a thorough and patient manner. My ideal job would be to sit in a dusty back room somewhere and never talk to anyone. I sort of knew this was my predilection while I was in library school (ok, honestly, I knew it outright from the beginning), but I thought that I would be able to find jobs in librarianship that would enable me to work more with books than with people. I was wrong. I mean, those kinds of jobs exist, they just don’t exist for me. Most of my background, unfortunately, has been in reference services, and I have no experience doing things that would get me away from people--like say, collection management or cataloging. (And I’m not detail-oriented enough to be a cataloger anyway). I had hoped to work in an environment that would allow me to do a variety of tasks and thus take the focus off all-people all-the-time--and I believe it is probably true that in a decently staffed, normal-sized library, I would only have to work 2-3 hours per day on the reference desk, thus enabling me to keep a modicum of my sanity--but this is not the job I currently have. In the job I have now, I sit on the reference-information-circulation-help-me-I-don’t-know-how-to-use-a-computer desk 6-8 hours a day (the six-hour days are the days when I’m scheduled to be in 2 hours before the library opens). I have no private work space at all, nor any space I can escape to during the day. I don’t drive, so I don’t even have a car I can go sit in if I need to. Most of the time I’m so bored I could cry, which is no fun, but it’s even less fun to be constantly in the public eye, where I can’t even listen to music or have private phone conversations (which makes it a real blast when I have to make an appointment with the lady-parts doctor).

In a nutshell, all-people-every-day DRIVE ME CRAZY. I cannot take this anymore. The combination of the constant boredom plus the mainly customer-service aspects of this job are making me really unhappy. I never thought I would be this age, still struggling at a menial position for peanuts, and doing it in front of the whole world. I feel like my brain is dying.

Help me, Internet!

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