While I’m sure some of you imagine me as a Baba Yaga-type figure that sits in a tree on College Street, judging people and collecting Natty Light cans for the five-cent redemption fee, I actually do have a day job. Every morning, I drive almost an hour to a public library which will here remain nameless, because the one five minutes down the street from my house would be too easy to get to. When I got the job, the hiring manager asked me if I enjoyed working with the public. I said yes, because I did not know what I was talking about.
This week, I cleaned up the aftermath of a “cake fight” between two middle-aged men and had an hour-long conversation with a teenage boy about censorship after I suggested he not watch porn on the library computer, three feet from his grandma. Every morning, the same elderly man comes to my desk and provides me — an hourly, part-time employee at the very bottom rung of the totem pole — with a list of grievances about our policies, our collection and the way the magazine room smells like cough medicine. Once, a lady made me look up reviews of half the books in our romance section, because she only wanted to read the ones that “really knock your socks off.”
And you know what annoys me more than that? All the people who aren’t coming to the library. Seriously, people. You’re not doing yourself any favors by spending $24.99 every time you get the urge to “read the classics.” Get yourself to the library and check out a book. If you can’t read, check out a DVD. If you, like everyone else, torrent all your movies, just come hang out. It’s the coolest place on Earth.
This article was originally published in Little Village issue 305.
