Mini Mailer May Prompt
Dear First Job
I was a teenage library book shelver
When I was 16, my high school German teacher gave me a reference so that your supervisors would hire me. I was excited to join the world of work, and more so the inner world of library books.
Did you think it was funny to call the job “library page”? It always made me think of myself as a single page in a big book, even though I knew that wasn’t the “page” you meant. I had started studying philosophy by then, so I thought a lot about such things.
Your part-time page positions attracted a few different types of people: high school students, parents, and generally quiet folks who didn’t want to work someplace like the mall or maybe even with people at all.
Our staff meetings became surprisingly lively, with arguments about where to store the stools we sometimes needed to stand on for high shelves or sit on for low shelves. I didn’t learn the trick about sitting on the stool until months had gone by and I’d already worn out the knees in my jeans.
One time your page supervisor arrived at the staff meeting with visual aids: she had made photocopies of the spines of improperly shelved books and gave everyone hard copies of the evidence of these mistakes that she didn’t want anyone to make again.
That staff meeting felt harsh to me, like she hoped to break us down so someone would confess to the misshelving. No one did.
We pulled up our text-only email accounts once per shift in green text on plain black screens that connected by phone line to the computers at the library service center, 30 miles to the north of you. The library catalog operated that way, too. It hadn’t been very long before that you’d still had the physical catalogs, with the meticulously typed index cards tucked away in wooden drawers.
We logged everything we did on a paper timesheet your page supervisor had devised. We had to record how much time we spent on each task. I don’t mind telling you that I didn’t push myself to hurry, but I did keep an eye on the clock, not wanting to stand out as working too slowly.
Mostly we shelved books. The clerks who worked at the front desk, checking books in and out, would presort the books and other library materials onto wooden or metal carts by genre or type: fiction, nonfiction, children’s, etc. Sometimes we got to shelve a cart of videos or books on tape.
Fiction was the best. I liked to look at the photos of authors, especially the ones like Danielle Steel who opted for dramatic poses. Hers were always themed to the book, like a glamour shot with a huge necklace for her novel called Jewels.
Nonfiction was exhausting because there would be heavy cookbooks, gardening books, art books… Even today when I check books out, I think of the person who will have to shelve them when I bring them back.
I met my first real crush while working at you. She was a page, too, and a year ahead of me at a different high school. I didn’t know I had a crush for the longest time. In fact, I didn’t even feel it the year I worked at you. It began in earnest a few years later, on the bus to the university when I ran into her because we were both living with our parents and commuting to school. That’s another story, but I figured I’d mention it to you.
After a year, much as I loved being around your books, I felt tired of all the shelving. I went home feeling achy after each shift. I had a chance to start tutoring writing and philosophy, and I left you, but maybe you knew I’d return a couple more times over the years to become a clerk and then a “technical liaison,” which meant I knew how to reboot the computers when they got stuck.
By the time I went back, you’d changed a lot. You had new computers with Word and public internet, which meant some people were writing resumes or school papers while others were expressing concerns about access to porn or asking for help with setting up email. I was happy to be working at the circulation desk and checking the books in and out for a different group of pages to shelve.
Maybe I’m no longer a page in your book, but in my mind I’ll always be part of your collection, trying to look cool in my imagined author photo as I hide out in the shelves.
