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.