• Mood: tormented
• Music: People are Strange (the Echo & the Bunnymen version)

Why I don't talk much about work

For those of you into comics, or RPGs, or anime, or Star Trek, or the like, you know the problems you have trying to have a meaningful conversation with your family & friends who've never experienced any of those things? How you either get a completely blank look of noncomprehension in response, or spend so much time translating and explaining the background of just about everything you want to say that whatever point you wanted to make gets completely lost in the shuffle?

That's what it's like trying to tell anyone outside of the library field what I actually do for a living. It's a bit like the definition of "brotherhood" that one of my fraternity brothers came across and spread around: "For those on the outside, it has no definition. For those on the inside, it needs no definition."

Most people generally understand the term "librarian", so now that I actually have the degree and the job that go with that title, I can actually use it and save a little trouble--except that I don't work in the public areas of the library at all. I don't shelve books, I don't recommend books, I don't shush people, I don't stamp books that people want to borrow, or just about anything else that comes to mind when one hears the term "librarian." (I also don't wear long skirts, sensible shoes, granny glasses, or a hair bun.)

Thankfully, kateshort can keep up some of the time, now that she's started using some of the same tools I do, but even her eyes glaze over when I try to vent about that end of things.

-sigh-

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Feudalism: Serf & Turf