Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemmi
I always wanted to be a librarian but, sadly, that never worked out for me. I would have been quite happy there, surrounded by books all the time.
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A late former girlfriend was a librarian, and was happy at it. But she worked as a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, and had some odd postings. One was Enterprise, AL, noted for a statue of the boll weevil. It seems the original settlers in the area tried to grow cotton like everyone else. The boll weevil cleaned them out, so they shifted to peanuts, and did pretty well, thank you. They decided in retrospect that brother weevil had done them a favor in forcing them to change crops, and put up a statue to commemorate it.
A long time male friend got his graduate degree in library science, but never reallly
practiced the trade.
His first job out of school was as a high school librarian on Grenada in the Virgin Islands. His daily routine began when a student would shinny up a tree, and bring him a coconut for breakfast. He'd stagger to his office, and fall asleep behind his desk till lunch, when everyone went out for food and a couple of drinks. Back to the office, and sleep again till 3PM when school was out, and everyone would go out for dinner, parties, and more drinks.
Actual librarianship? There wasn't any. The school library had no
books.
He realized that if he stayed there he'd become yet another drunken sot, and best to return to the US. That was complicated by the fact that a hurricane had destroyed the building where local records were kept, and he dropped off the IRS radar screen. (I don't think he's ever quite decided whether to forgive his brother for pushing him to go through the trouble to get himself reestablished...)
Back in the states, he was a consulting librarian to various law firms, helping to maintain their law libraries, but as that increasingly went on line, he dropped it. For some years, he was a chimney sweep in the area where he chose to settle. These days, he makes a comfortable living investing in the stock market. I've had the odd conversation where I said "Bill, you should get this concept. You got your Masters in Library Science!" "Yeah, but when was I an actual librarian? I wasn't! I
don't get it!"
(These days, I'm a director of a small company he formed to try to bring written SF and fantasy to the screen. My title is Director and Factotum. My actual function is "Guy Bill calls whenever he doesn't know something, figuring I
will know it." That's generally true, but some of the things he doesn't know have resulted in surreal conversations. How he managed to attain his current age and do all of the things he's done and
not know them is a source of bemused wonder for me.)
______
Dennis