An interesting thread on FriendFeed as become a grander meme, which I shall help perpetuate. This thread is an off-shoot of the Day in the Life of a Librarian discussion begun by the heretofore tagged Librarian by Day. The follow-up questions raised by Superstarchivist are:

What made you become a library/archives/museum employee? Was there a person? A life-changing event at a reference desk? A tarot card?

My path to the library world was rather unintentional. I never had a burning desire to become a librarian but am rather glad that this is the path I ended up on. After a few rather lousy jobs in the for-profit world, I decided I needed a job “that wouldn’t make me nauseous.” That was actually the phrase I used at the time.

I had a couple of jobs during college, the main one being as a maintenance person (for lack of a better term) for a local bank. It got me through college but ended rather unpleasantly when I was fired at the Christmas party…outside the men’s room…in front of my date. Classy.

After college (during the first Bush recession), I had a rather difficult time finding a job. I was an English major, which certainly didn’t help. I eventually (through a relative) got a job as a proofreader at an ad agency. Their business was to place classified ads, and my jobs was to clip out the printed ads and proofread them against the original copy to check for mistakes. Zzzzz.

One of the things I like about the library world compared to the for-profit world is that it tends (tends, mind you) to be less rigid. The ad agency had a rule that everyone had to work until 7pm on Thursdays. Something to do with placing all the weekend ads. This had nothing to do with me, but I was still required to stay late. At that time, the train I needed to take began to run less frequently, so when I left at 7, I had to wait something like 45 minutes for a train. The train I took in in the morning got me to the job early, so I asked if I could leave 5 minutes early so I wouldn’t have to catch an earlier train. The answer was a categorical no. Everyone had to stay until 7. I got fired from this job as well.

After another bout of unemployment, I got a job working at a friend’s family’s print shot. When I actually got the chance to learn to work some of the printing machinery, I rather like the job. Unfortunately, that made up only a small fraction of my time. Most of the time, I was in shipping and receiving.

Again, rigidity was an issue for me. They actually had a buzzer that went off at the start of the day, at the beginning and ending of break time, the beginning and ending of lunch, and at the end of the day. I don’t do well in that kind of atmosphere, to say the least.

So, I began to realize that I hadn’t anything akin to a “career path.” Having an English degree, I figured I would teach, so I started in a graduate education program at night at the same school I got my undergraduate degree. Most of the people in the program were already teachers and were taking the next step. Then there was me and the roofer guy.

I found out that employees at that school got a major break on tuition, so I started looking for jobs there. My shipping and receiving experience landed my a job at the acquisitions department at the library. Part of the position was filling in some desk coverage in the media department. I held that job for about 3 years before moving up to be the student-worker supervisor for the circulation department. I was there for about a year before getting a job as a serials assistant and a small medical library. At that time, I realized that working in libraries did not make me nauseous, so I decided to get my library degree (having dropped out of the grad ed program a while before).

And that’s how I became I librarian.

In addition to Librarian by Day, I shall tag:

• Attempting Elegance
• Pegasus Librarian
• Pop Culture Librarian
• The Strange Librarian
• And the Superstarchivist since she avoided her own question