I actually started climbing the ladder and to be honest, I fucking hate it and am looking for a way out. I have never dealt with so many people that are willing to sacrifice their own dignity to be a sycophant for the sake of money.
Same. It fucking sucks but it’s the only way I’ve found to making enough money to do the shit I actually want to do. Which I’m still not making enough money for because inflation keeps up with half my pay raises…
Always interesting how the world works I spent from 2007 - 2018 in shit jobs where baby boomers were in control of everything and I hated it… They’re arseholes
Now it’s 2026… I’m nearly 40 and insecure Gen X managers (actual psychopaths) are doing everything they can to destroy people my age and younger.
Now before anyone starts up telling me I’m the same. I work with a few Gen z people and I do everything I can to prop them up, I want to help them I don’t want any of them to fail… When I was starting in IT support I got shit on by baby boomers and 50% of Gen X (the other half helped me).
Life is too hard to be cruel to people just trying their best. Every time I see a young person struggling and I help them out makes me happier that baby boomers will all die soon and Gen X will all fuck off into retirement.
I can’t even explain now many entitled psychopaths I have to deal with are all Gen X… They were the generation of “Fuck the rules, fuck the police”
Now they’re all old and they’re “Fuck the rules, give me what I want and give me it now! I am more important than everyone and you need to treat me like I’m a king/queen”
Get your library science degree now, there are only a few accredited programs. I thought about doing this earlier this year and was surprised at how complicated it actually was to become a librarian.
you need a masters for the most part. a covoluted booking system, dewey system(i was helping them in my HS years very confusing to put which books where. plus also internet research for the unitiated from reputable sources.) of course public libaries you have to deal with Homeless people/bums that would smell or try to do drugs(these libraries tend to have security too), or people watching PORN.
I actually had a job shelving books as a teenager. It is to date the best job I ever had. No one bothered me. I just took books from the return slots at the library and put them back for a few hours after school. Sometimes I even dared to get a list of reservations to find and shelve elsewhere.
The greatest gift of my career was getting old enough to not care.
I wish factory jobs paid better. Many of them are chill and easy.
some of they are brutal apparently, like that one union one with kellogs? or that chip factory. that was in the news years ago.
Some are, yes. I’ve worked a number of different positions in a local factory and most of them weren’t a big deal.
A few were rough, though, for sure. Can con-fucking-firm.
So uh…we are all clearly unhappy, is any of us going to do anything about this? (I already stated I am, some community idea).
Except not that gross 24 corporate ladder thing. But I guess 18-2x I was studying web design and had aspirations of making the next big web 2.0 site, back when it was still popular to idolize Google.
But by 24 I was already drinking the foss kool-aid and becoming jaded toward the tech industry.
Oof. Literally my life’s story so far.
So you want to become a librarian?
SSSHHHH not so loud or i’m gonna have to ask you to leave
^Great job. I’ll keep it down.^
I want to be a bookstore employee
Or: is there a job… where I can just live my life? Like, spend time with friends and doing hobbies and still getting paid?
Trust fund kid.
You mean… you want to live your life and not add value to someone else’s wallet?
I for one love to work for soulless schmucks who profit from my labor and make the tough decisions like not giving raises this year.
“3/5 - Meets Expectations”
Do what you love except hold a camera in your offhand and shout “bro bro honestly like actually what just happened!? Like and subscribe!” Every 30 seconds.
Get independently wealthy. Can you marry someone rich?
Hey wait a minute! I did not said i wanted to meet a woman
Wealthy investor.
That’s just called “being rich.” Work duties do include disenfranchizing the poor, with quarterly reviews by peers in the Illuminati though.
So not quite as chill as you might hope from “having no logical fears or needs”.
During my first “job,” I was too young to be legally employed, so I volunteered at a library with my mom. Initially I worked in one of the back rooms, hidden from the public, helping to scan and sort books put in the return bins. (I discovered several great books by seeing them come back; among them were Dogsbody, Lovely Bones, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Those are listed alphabetically by title and that wasn’t even by design!)
After I volunteered long enough, I was deemed sufficiently experienced to put books on the shelves in the stacks. I was titled a “page” and proudly announced that while attending a LAN party. One of the other attendees of said party said “and if you do that long enough maybe you’ll become a full book!” I laughed quite heartily.
If you’ve never read anything else I wrote here, the post above will probably tell you everything you could possibly want to know about me.
Man, my first real job was at the library as a student page. That job fucking rocked so much and I wish I could have stayed there forever.
I got to shelve books, play with microfilm and microfiche, and listen to my CDs all day. It was the best job ever.
So have you made it to a chapter of your own? :3
Ha!
Librarians require a master’s and make like $34k a year.
The fuck you need a master’s for? The dewy decimal system ain’t that hard. 🤨
Because it’s meant to be the case that a librarian can help me if I need to join a correlation between etchings of revolutionary France and the poetry of William Blake
Because most people who work at the library aren’t librarians. Librarians maintain and manage a collection, set up the database, etc etc.
You certainly don’t need a masters just to do that.
Think museum curator, not book warehouse owner. They have to make complex decisions involving knowledge about knowledge.
Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don’t you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren’t?
Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.
It’s really much more broad than “Someone who works at the local library”
Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living… untill I saw the effort required and the pay.
How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can’t know about everything. You’d just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?
Edit: Everyone chill, I wasn’t dissing the previous comment, I was just curious. I know that running a library needs a degree. But I didn’t know the responsibility of expanding collection fell on the one maintaining the library (excluding requests from users). I thought maybe they at most subscribe to a list of award winners or top cited books or something.
Research skills that you acquire during your master’s (incl. but not limited to, talking to other experts)
You can talk with other experts without having master’s
Sure, you can ask 10 experts, and get 11 opinions.
Researching books, authors, subjects, and determining which ones are appropriate and which ones aren’t is complex stuff.
You would, for example, research the authors prior publishing history of books and journal articles, read peer reviews of their articles, check their references, research the history of the authors of their references ECT to build an idea of what sort of author you’re dealing with. Do they know their stuff, or are they just a book mill? Is any of the subject matter contradictory, controversial, out of date, or incomplete. Repeat for 30 books on the same subject to find the most comprehensive work for your collection.
Just to check - do you know that they do this, or do you think that’s the way it’s best done? - Because that is a lot of work and you’d need a lot of librarians
part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they’re worth acquiring for the collection. So, you’d look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there’s anything they’d suggest. You research the author, find out if they’re involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.
Yes, that sounds trivial, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.
Your library experience was very different from mine. We mostly just told people how to sign up for the wait list for 50 Shades of gray, what programs we did for the kids, and putting away the books everyone left everywhere.
The pay is what scared me away. Branch Manager, highest position I interacted with, couldn’t afford their own transportation, and was going through their second green card marriage for money because they were desperate. Had 2 Masters.
A lot of jobs are easy on a day-to-day basis, but get hard every once in a while when some edge case comes up and you’ve gotta have a breadth of background knowledge of the field to handle it effectively. It’s why AI seems so useful to middle managers who don’t realize that edge cases exist; their employees can handle them without issue, but AI spits out total garbage and calls it done. I’d imagine librarians are indeed dealing with people looking for the latest fad book more often than not, but they still have to be prepared for the person coming in wanting to know all about insect phylogeny.
I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.
“Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.
You don’t but it does gatekeep the position. Helps your job security…
does it have to be a masters in librarian? ive got this engineering degree i wouldnt mind using for something a little less corporate.
yea its a requirement for libraries, Universities might be more competitive, since you likely need another area of expertise to complement your resume to.
Yup. MLS or MLIS.
Yes, but you can work in a library without being a librarian. Check out code4lib. It’s a (free online) techie conference with associated slack channel, and it’s for folks that, roughly, code for libraries. Tbh, I think the techie route to working in a library is easier than the master’s degree. Source: engineering undergrad, have my mslis, work in a library, current position doesn’t require an mslis.
Me at 46: I want to dismantle the machinery that makes trillionaires.
If you take away their right to break the law, how will you become the next trillionaire?! - Stupid right wing people
This is me at all ages I can remember. By extrapolation, I can only assume I spent my toddler years fighting for the rights of the proletariat.
I had the job shelving books. I’d show up in a button-up shirt and slacks and I could shove all day with no problem at all. No one would bother me. I’d show up in ripped jeans, a Metallica t-shirt, and 4 years since my last haircut and people would ask me for help every moment of the day. Libraries are weird.
Good example of outfits sending signals.
Slacks and a button-up probably made you look like management just out picking up slack, and people subconsciously left you alone - “oh, they’re probably really busy with management stuff and also had to go shelve books… I’ll leave them alone”
Casual clothes in contrast would have signalled “worker” - “I’ll just go ask that person, it’s not like they’re doing anything important, they’re just shelving books!”
It probably didn’t help that I was a 17-year-old that looked like I was in my late twenties.
