I’m tired of jobs startin off at five fifty an hour
Then this boss wonders why I’m smartin off
I’m tired of being fired everytime I fart and cough
Tired of having to work as a gas station clerk
for this jerk breathing down my neck driving me bezerk
I’m tired of using plastic silverware
Tired of working in Builders Square
Tired of not being a millionaire

–“If I Had,” Eminem

Well, last week I was on a tear because of the whole library employment situation in Seattle. I guess I should say it’s a non-situation, because one local system has been in a hiring freeze for over a year now, and the other system has something satanic and soul-destroying called a “hiring pool,” which they developed right before my class graduated last year (’04). As an aside, some employees were so digruntled with the new pool process, they are suing the library system.

The hiring pool works like this: you apply to be in the pool. It’s a standard government/city application–reference check, essays, and so on. If they like what they see on your resume, then they call you and do a phone interview. If you pass that screening, then you go on to three to five more interviews. The first two are one-on-one interviews, an hour apiece. Then there is a “skills assessment” where they judge your people/customer service skills. There are then two more optional interviews, one for the Youth Services pool and another for the Children’s Services pool. If you pass all that, then congratulations! You may now, after six interviews totaling about three-and-a-half hours (not including prep, travel, and time off work, of course), sit in the pool for an indeterminate amount of time!

I love this quote from the article I linked above, regarding the lawsuit. “[Charlene] Richards said the pool was created to streamline the hiring process for the library system.” (Charlene Richards is the HR manager for the system.) This must be a new meaning of the word “steamline” of which I was not aware.

AND THEN, if you are “lucky,” like my companion, you will obtain a very high pool score, which puts you at the top of the list to get called for every librarian opening. HOWEVER, (here’s the hitch) you will interview against five other people, half of whom are usually internal applicants. Who have experience in the system as substitutes, or are full-on librarians who are trying to transfer to another branch because of location or more hours. There are a lot of twenty- and thirty-hour positions, and people are often trying to get up to the coveted forty-hour job.

I have lost track, but in my estimation, since my companion entered the pool in October of 2004, he has had about fifteen interviews at the branches. He says that a lot of the time the librarians feel kind of bad and they will overtly tell him they have internal applicants, and HR has said the same thing, which means “don’t get your hopes up,” of course.

Recently, as I have mentioned, he was offered a temporary substitute position through the library, in an undesirable location, which would have run through December. He was about to take it when he discovered that his boss at the giant local software company he is contracting for badly wanted to keep him and increased his salary, beating the pants off the standard Librarian I salary he was offered for the temporary position.

So my companion has turned his back on the library world. On Sunday night we had two friends over for dinner from graduate school. One is an academic librarian, and the other is a public librarian. In fact, the public librarian is the one who told us that my companion was considered “too iSchool” for the branch he interviewed for. I asked her what she thought the interviewing librarian meant when she said that.

“Well,” our friend said, “our graduate program has a bad reputation. The librarians’ perceptions are that we don’t learn anything worthwhile in the program. They want to see real world experience.” Again, I have to say that my companion has student librarian experience, and has worked in libraries prior to graduate school as a non-professional. Our academic librarian friend interjected that our program was helpful to her in her job search, because her interviewers did want to hear about her thoughts regarding academic/information theory, pedagogy, etc, which makes sense because she is working in an academic environment and expected to teach and do research. (Halo, step in here if I am slaughtering what you meant.) I also know quite a few people who went through our program and slid right back into the business world whence they came. So perhaps our program is less helpful for public librarians, especially greener ones.

The catch, however, as is the case with many professional fields, is that you can’t become a public librarian unless you have the training and the degree, but then it’s hard to break in if you don’t have a ton of experience, which you can’t get beyond lower-level paraprofessional experience because you don’t have the degree. Rinse, repeat, bang head against wall. With a few exceptions, the public librarians I have seen hired after graduation have had student experience with the system they applied to as graduating professionals.

But my companion is the last person in the world to lie in a puddle feeling sorry for himself, so now he puts his damn pants on every morning and is project managing the hell out of his project. And now he has PM experience, which means he should be able to nab that next PM contract that comes down the pike. The upshot to this is that I don’t need to find a job for the time being, and I think we can even pay on our student loans when they come due next year. Medium pimpin’ feels pretty good after being so far away from any kind of pimpin’ at all that the pimp club was just a tiny, blingy dot off in the horizon.

So now it doesn’t matter if my companion did not have enough student experience, didn’t know the right people, was too techie, had too much indexing experience, or was pushing water uphill by trying to become a children’s librarian…with a penis (shh). These are all theories I’ve heard over the past year. It’s too bad for our local library that they are losing someone so talented, enthusiastic, and dedicated. And it’s been sad watching his dream slowly get squashed over the past year. But, as we have come to realize, the best thing we have gotten out of grad school was each other.

And now I can be an Asshole, and tell my favorite librarian joke:

What’s the difference between a large pizza and a librarian?

A large pizza can feed a family of four!

Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here until I get sued for libel.

I have really tried to dial it down on any posting related to librarianship, especially since this fiasco, when some nutbar decided she couldn’t deal with my idea of satire and tried to start a smear campaign on her blog. Plus, I am not working in the field right now, so Library Thots aren’t exactly tumbling out of me. But I have to tell you about something that happened recently.

So, many of my informationally-abled friends have been passing around the link to this article, which is about how hard it is to find the first post-MLIS job. It’s a good article–thoughtful, well-written, and the author isn’t whining in any way, which I have to admit is SUPER TEMPTING. I will be whining myself later.

The gist of the article is that a library job-seeker may never know how they landed the job they end up with, because the odds are pretty freakin stacked against us right now. “Waves of librarian retirement” that we were promised in grad school? Not happening. Budgets continue to be cut. That deluxe chunk of robot poop downtown that passes for a library is great and all, but the main library cut back their hours upon opening it, and instituted a hiring freeze shortly after we graduated last year.

But if you know someone In The System, then you may actually know why you got passed over for a certain job. A friend in the system ran into a woman who passed up my companion for a job at a branch a few weeks ago. “We liked him,” she said, “but he was too iSchool.” (She was referring to the University of Washington’s library and information science program, which is where we were trained.)

Here is the MLIS program’s “mission statement.” In a nutshell, they are user/patron-focused, are concerned with the “life” or behavior of information, and integrate a fair amount of technology education into the program. It is a diverse degree, and people go on to many different occupations in the realm of information and librarianship. Without going into it here, I will say it is a flawed program, but if you combine the theory and classroom work with student work in the field, you have a solid start and a degree that legally certifies you to call yourself a big-L Librarian.

So for this librarian to say to our friend that my companion is “too iSchool”…I was shocked. He is being punished now for paying thousands of dollars to be professionally trained as a librarian at a modern information school. Guess what, lady? They’re not offering us classes in due date stamping anymore, and try as I might I could not find one class on the care and feeding of card catalogues. This is how librarians are being trained now. She may clue into that at some point, months or years from now, but my companion will be working elsewhere by then. I had heard rumors about “traditional” librarians (whatever that means) being disinclined to hire people who are techie, and now I’m starting to believe it. Because you know how to program you can’t talk to patrons?

For the past few months, my companion has been a contractor at a large local software company. He is being underpaid and is doing much more than he was hired for, but his techie skills are keeping a roof over our heads. He is also designing websites in his spare time. This is a man who did not even have an email address until the amazing year 2002. He wants to be a librarian, at a public library, but his enthusiasm started flagging around the time he got his fifteenth rejection letter from the same library system in the mail. He has one of the highest ratings in the hiring pool, but he continues to be not quite right…or too iSchool, I guess.

They are missing out on someone who understands how both the back end (technology) as well as the front end (people) of a library works. Someone else is going to snap him up soon, I’m sure. If my companion wasn’t so “iSchool”…if all he could be was a librarian…I’d be standing in line downtown for food stamps right now. FUCK YOU.

In Other NEWS!

Every night for the past three nights I have been awakened, sometimes more than once, by my kid with her face all covered with blood. Frannie is prone to nosebleeds in the winter, but it’s been especially bad lately. This apartment gets bone dry in cool weather, so I’m going to have to do something. I think we are going to try buying a humidifier today, because I can’t be awakened by bloodbath-a-go-go again. YEEG.

Did you read this, Mom? All those nights I woke you up after carpeting myself head-to-toe in vomit…revenge is yours. I don’t know where it can go from here. Maybe Franny’s future child will pee out of her eye corners or something.

Poor Frannie! She has a lot of nose anxiety, whereas I used my nose to make other people anxious. I discovered at age eight that I could fit Crayola markers up my nose, which would make my babysitters cringe. When I was a few years older than Frannie I used to bump rails of unsweetened Kool-Aid so I could sneeze purple and green on other kids at the bus stop. I also used to spend a lot of time alone, wondering why I didn’t have any friends. I am starting to think these two things may be related.

UPDATE! 9/28

No nosebleeds last night, and the humidifier put her right to sleep. She said she felt better in the morning, too. It can get awfully dry here considering this is a “temperate rainforest.”