Me at 46: I want to dismantle the machinery that makes trillionaires.
If you take away their right to break the law, how will you become the next trillionaire?! - Stupid right wing people
This is me at all ages I can remember. By extrapolation, I can only assume I spent my toddler years fighting for the rights of the proletariat.
So you want to become a librarian?
SSSHHHH not so loud or i’m gonna have to ask you to leave
^Great job. I’ll keep it down.^
I want to be a bookstore employee
Or: is there a job… where I can just live my life? Like, spend time with friends and doing hobbies and still getting paid?
You mean… you want to live your life and not add value to someone else’s wallet?
I for one love to work for soulless schmucks who profit from my labor and make the tough decisions like not giving raises this year.
“3/5 - Meets Expectations”
Do what you love except hold a camera in your offhand and shout “bro bro honestly like actually what just happened!? Like and subscribe!” Every 30 seconds.
Get independently wealthy. Can you marry someone rich?
Hey wait a minute! I did not said i wanted to meet a woman
Wealthy investor.
That’s just called “being rich.” Work duties do include disenfranchizing the poor, with quarterly reviews by peers in the Illuminati though.
So not quite as chill as you might hope from “having no logical fears or needs”.
Trust fund kid.
During my first “job,” I was too young to be legally employed, so I volunteered at a library with my mom. Initially I worked in one of the back rooms, hidden from the public, helping to scan and sort books put in the return bins. (I discovered several great books by seeing them come back; among them were Dogsbody, Lovely Bones, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Those are listed alphabetically by title and that wasn’t even by design!)
After I volunteered long enough, I was deemed sufficiently experienced to put books on the shelves in the stacks. I was titled a “page” and proudly announced that while attending a LAN party. One of the other attendees of said party said “and if you do that long enough maybe you’ll become a full book!” I laughed quite heartily.
If you’ve never read anything else I wrote here, the post above will probably tell you everything you could possibly want to know about me.
Man, my first real job was at the library as a student page. That job fucking rocked so much and I wish I could have stayed there forever.
I got to shelve books, play with microfilm and microfiche, and listen to my CDs all day. It was the best job ever.
So have you made it to a chapter of your own? :3
Ha!
I work in a hospital in a lab where I look at small pieces of the human body through a microscope in a quiet office where people apologize for interrupting me. It’s heaven
knockknockknock
Sorry to bother you…
You ever look at your dick and balls with that microscope?
No but I’ve seen many another man’s dick and balls at the cellular level lmao
Did this guy ever apologise?
Ahhh fuck, now I’m going to have to watch The Rock again. Thankyou for your service.
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Librarians require a master’s and make like $34k a year.
The fuck you need a master’s for? The dewy decimal system ain’t that hard. 🤨
Because it’s meant to be the case that a librarian can help me if I need to join a correlation between etchings of revolutionary France and the poetry of William Blake
Because most people who work at the library aren’t librarians. Librarians maintain and manage a collection, set up the database, etc etc.
You certainly don’t need a masters just to do that.
Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don’t you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren’t?
Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.
It’s really much more broad than “Someone who works at the local library”
Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living… untill I saw the effort required and the pay.
Your library experience was very different from mine. We mostly just told people how to sign up for the wait list for 50 Shades of gray, what programs we did for the kids, and putting away the books everyone left everywhere.
The pay is what scared me away. Branch Manager, highest position I interacted with, couldn’t afford their own transportation, and was going through their second green card marriage for money because they were desperate. Had 2 Masters.
A lot of jobs are easy on a day-to-day basis, but get hard every once in a while when some edge case comes up and you’ve gotta have a breadth of background knowledge of the field to handle it effectively. It’s why AI seems so useful to middle managers who don’t realize that edge cases exist; their employees can handle them without issue, but AI spits out total garbage and calls it done. I’d imagine librarians are indeed dealing with people looking for the latest fad book more often than not, but they still have to be prepared for the person coming in wanting to know all about insect phylogeny.
How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can’t know about everything. You’d just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?
Edit: Everyone chill, I wasn’t dissing the previous comment, I was just curious. I know that running a library needs a degree. But I didn’t know the responsibility of expanding collection fell on the one maintaining the library (excluding requests from users). I thought maybe they at most subscribe to a list of award winners or top cited books or something.
Research skills that you acquire during your master’s (incl. but not limited to, talking to other experts)
You can talk with other experts without having master’s
part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they’re worth acquiring for the collection. So, you’d look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there’s anything they’d suggest. You research the author, find out if they’re involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.
Yes, that sounds trivial, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.
Sure, you can ask 10 experts, and get 11 opinions.
Researching books, authors, subjects, and determining which ones are appropriate and which ones aren’t is complex stuff.
You would, for example, research the authors prior publishing history of books and journal articles, read peer reviews of their articles, check their references, research the history of the authors of their references ECT to build an idea of what sort of author you’re dealing with. Do they know their stuff, or are they just a book mill? Is any of the subject matter contradictory, controversial, out of date, or incomplete. Repeat for 30 books on the same subject to find the most comprehensive work for your collection.
Just to check - do you know that they do this, or do you think that’s the way it’s best done? - Because that is a lot of work and you’d need a lot of librarians
I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.
“Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.
Think museum curator, not book warehouse owner. They have to make complex decisions involving knowledge about knowledge.
You don’t but it does gatekeep the position. Helps your job security…
does it have to be a masters in librarian? ive got this engineering degree i wouldnt mind using for something a little less corporate.
Yes, but you can work in a library without being a librarian. Check out code4lib. It’s a (free online) techie conference with associated slack channel, and it’s for folks that, roughly, code for libraries. Tbh, I think the techie route to working in a library is easier than the master’s degree. Source: engineering undergrad, have my mslis, work in a library, current position doesn’t require an mslis.
Yup. MLS or MLIS.
yea its a requirement for libraries, Universities might be more competitive, since you likely need another area of expertise to complement your resume to.
Never wanted to climb the ladder, but it was the only way I could really get better pay.
The higher I go, the more I can’t stand the conversations. Being straightforward is a career killer. Competing with folks that talk big without knowledge, knowing I need to carefully balance working with them while making sure my ass is documented and covered for any blame when they screw up and want to throw someone under the bus.
I have generally still loved talking to the “grunts” and customers. People who have real problems and doing real stuff without so much office politic crap going on. Not people trying to write blog posts to try to sound smart without actually doing anything or actually knowing the material.
Always interesting how the world works I spent from 2007 - 2018 in shit jobs where baby boomers were in control of everything and I hated it… They’re arseholes
Now it’s 2026… I’m nearly 40 and insecure Gen X managers (actual psychopaths) are doing everything they can to destroy people my age and younger.
Now before anyone starts up telling me I’m the same. I work with a few Gen z people and I do everything I can to prop them up, I want to help them I don’t want any of them to fail… When I was starting in IT support I got shit on by baby boomers and 50% of Gen X (the other half helped me).
Life is too hard to be cruel to people just trying their best. Every time I see a young person struggling and I help them out makes me happier that baby boomers will all die soon and Gen X will all fuck off into retirement.
I can’t even explain now many entitled psychopaths I have to deal with are all Gen X… They were the generation of “Fuck the rules, fuck the police”
Now they’re all old and they’re “Fuck the rules, give me what I want and give me it now! I am more important than everyone and you need to treat me like I’m a king/queen”
I dunno I thought I wanted this and took a job at a datacenter
Some days I don’t even interact with another human
5 years into this and it’s completely killed my social skills and therefore social life, im thinking about moving on for this reason actually
If it pays ok, why not volunteer?
You get to socialise, you get to feel a part of your community, you get to feel like you’re making a difference, etc.
I don’t know why but the hermit nature of the job leaks into my real life and I tend to not want to socialize outside of work either
It’s all been a slow burn in this way
Im in the same boat. Perpetual screen time is fine if you have colleagues next to you that you can shoot the shit with. Without them? Brain becomes a spongey moss
It’s not just screen time in my case. Alone in the datacenter at night is like some liminal space and it feels like there is something inherently unhealthy standing amongst the whirring server racks. Even with hearing protection it just drives a guy mad in a way
Probably because it’s a toxic, hostile environment solely designed for machines…
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Wut
I found that forcing myself to go out when I was invited to things fixed this for me. Now I actually look forward to doing things with my friends again. I am fortunate enough to have some really good friends now though. That hasn’t always been the case.
I’ll second the volunteering, though I never really feel comfortable socializing among the volunteers, it still feels good actually doing something I think matters, but at the same time know I’m utterly replacable and no one would specifically need me to do any of it.
Off topic but out of curiosity, how many people actually work in a data center? I’ve always wanted to work in one but got the impression that there are only a small number of people, maybe a dozen or so, dedicated to keeping the hardware running.
But hearing how it’s affected you makes me think it might not be the best choice for me. I worked from home for about 5 years up to and during COVID, and honestly can relate to feeling less comfortable in social situations after a while. I think the first year or so I was fine and then started to notice the decline of actually wanting to interact with other people.
I work in a very small datacenter and there are around 100 people overall. But majority of people usually work from home. I am one of 3 people on site who rotates shifts to have someone onsite at all times. But everyone comes to the datacenter for various things at some point
There are times where there are lots of people onsite and I do socialize but due to my position I am usually completely alone on the evening shifts
me at 50 after the latest round of cutbacks and layoffs, “are there still jobs that will allow me to pay my bills?”
I had a 25-year career as a programmer, ending up making nearly $200K a year. Now I’m a school bus driver making about $30K, although fortunately that also includes subsidized (and really good) health insurance. I’m also fortunate because I already own a small house outright and was able to save a good bit when I was making good money. I quit programming (read: was laid off) just before the AI “revolution” so I’m thankful that I’ve missed all that bullshit.
Maybe I’ll be able to get back into coding after all the AI slop fails catastrophically and there’s nobody left in the industry who still knows how to actually code, but I don’t have my hopes up for that. Corporate bullshit is simply too strong for catastrophic failure to be a real problem.
Maybe I’m still too young. Early 30’s and asking a lot of questions about “why did we have a restructuring and layoffs if we had a record year for financials?” Not getting any answers of course, but I sure am getting a lot of information. Also getting to be the voice of all my coworkers. Literally all of them. We all hate it.
Be the change you want to see. If you are the voice of your coworkers. U n I o n I z e
You know the answer, we can make number go up more. And if it’s a public company, they literally have to play the game as fiduciaries
Me after surviving the layoffs, great all my bosses are gone it’s going to be months if not an entire year before they notice me again. Time to do the bare minimum!
My company got purchased and then the purchasing company got purchased by a huge west coast tech giant. Everybody from the original company got reassigned to new teams and we all ended up with new bosses who had no idea who we were or why we were even there. I had a very enjoyable six months “working” from home doing absolutely nothing before I was laid off. I even got a severance package about equivalent to a year’s salary for the first (and presumably last) time in my career.
Buddy of mine was a night janitor during college. I had to help him a few times, and it wasn’t a bad gig, run around and vacuum, mop some stuff, take out the trash. Dude listened to music the whole time and basically never saw anyone. Sometimes I kinda want to quit doing software just to do night janitoring.
And you can! Chase the dream!
While it was kinda fun “mindless” work, I just bought a house and need my software developer pay to keep the house.
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My bro is a dishie and never changed jobs once. I always used to try and push him to study or get into a career and would bang on about having a ‘respectable job’ - now im fantasising about listening to music while washing dishes all day
Yeah, at times just having a nice simpler job sounds nice. Not needing to deal with stupid error messages and poorly documented libraries.
Why did you need to help him?
He was one of 2 people that would clean like 4 buildings. Sometimes the other person wouldn’t show up (or one time his boss was arrested and given 22 years) and sometimes he’d call me to be the other janitor (sometimes he’d just do the job solo and keep the extra cash).
I had the job shelving books. I’d show up in a button-up shirt and slacks and I could shove all day with no problem at all. No one would bother me. I’d show up in ripped jeans, a Metallica t-shirt, and 4 years since my last haircut and people would ask me for help every moment of the day. Libraries are weird.
Good example of outfits sending signals.
Slacks and a button-up probably made you look like management just out picking up slack, and people subconsciously left you alone - “oh, they’re probably really busy with management stuff and also had to go shelve books… I’ll leave them alone”
Casual clothes in contrast would have signalled “worker” - “I’ll just go ask that person, it’s not like they’re doing anything important, they’re just shelving books!”
It probably didn’t help that I was a 17-year-old that looked like I was in my late twenties.
I never wanted the former, even as a kid.
All I’ve ever wanted is something that’s unstressful and fulfilling by doing good to others and gives me enough, both time and money, to be comfortable (and my view of comfortable in the money part is a lot less than the vast majority of people want).I think most of Genz doesn’t want it.
I found a nice quiet job in a lab that’s like this. No one fucks with me, some days I’m completely by myself, but the one drawback I’ve discovered is I find myself getting stuck in my own head a lot. Sometimes I have to go find something or someone to distract me.
Yeah, being alone on the job is not necesarily great. I have worked in a small data center for a large company for like 15 years now. I am the only one in the building many days but it gets quite lonely and boring.
The job you are looking for at 38 is Page but like every job within the library system. It pays worse than teaching for the no-exceptions required-education
Have a colleague who went from over $300k/year to like a $50k/year job. Basically something to vaguely keep the lights on while his savings took care of itself. Way too young to retire, but he figures he can be ok with his savings and bonuses he had over his high paying career.
I applied for Page like 3 times at my local library, but my resume reads as disillusioned tech bro so I don’t think I have much of a chance. t_t
You should legally change your name to Page, that should put you way above everyone else
They mostly hire high school, college age students. Sorry :(
