The Summer Job Files

In honor of the summer, we have rolled out a new weekly feature. Each week we will take turns to recount a summer job we had back in the day. [Editor's Note: Back in the day refers to when we were in school...sigh...college].

My first ever summer job was as a librarian.

Yes, you heard right. A librarian. And I wasn't a sexy one.

This job started as a after school job in the winter (or spring I can't remember) so I could earn some extra cash - let's just say I had a very expensive obsession with music of the pop persuasion - cough Hanson cough - and this was during the time when buying tapes/CD's and singles was still heard of.
I remember seeing that my local library needed some part-time help and my mom really pushed me to apply for the job because to my parent's dismay I didn't continue playing basketball in high school so during the winter/spring months I didn't have much to do after school except homework and watch Boy Meets World.

I don't think I even had to interview, they just hired me right off the bat. Another girl from the public school was also hired around the same time as me and let's just say she didn't care what she looked like (to the point where I don't think she showered). Add in a bunch of older women and kooky older man who wore some sick nasty sweater vests, and you have my co-workers.

To say that I was miserable is putting it lightly. At first the job was fine - I would come after school and work for two hours in my school uniform (sexy...or not). They would have me put books away on all 3 floors and then I would come back downstairs and they would have me work on various projects. But unfortunately since I grew up in a small town with a small library, there wasn't much for me to do - especially because there were two of us girls working there everyday after school.

Eventually I got tired of these "projects" (and for the life of me can't remember what any of these duties included - making flyers I guess?). So I would just take longer and longerrrrr to put away all the books that had come back from being checked out.

And towards the end of my career as a librarian, I would go upstairs and put away books for about a half hour and then just stay up there and read until I could leave. I got through Priscilla Presley's entire memoir before my co-workers figured out that I wasn't doing much work anymore.

One day, I overheard them talking about how they didn't understand what I was doing upstairs the whole time I was at work - 'was I just slow?' And then they said that they wished I was more like the other girl who I worked with (and I threw up in my mouth that I was considered a worse employee than someone who didn't shower).

I realized that my sweet $6.50 an hour job was coming to an end. Meaning: they were probably going to fire me. So I quit and told them I might be able to come back after volleyball camp was over mid-summer. Not that they missed me.

And I scratched librarian off my "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up" list and no longer did my after-school/summer jobs involve being inside the whole day.