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is Meaningless Happy Horseshit Business-speak for:
You’re welcome.
According to a survey conducted by the ALA, the mean librarian’s salary in 2008 is $58,960. Mind you, that’s mean, not average, which means that a few really high salaries aren’t skewing the curve. Supposedly, half of all librarians earn more than 58 grand per year.
Ahem.
Great Zombie Jesus. Who writes this shit? More to the point, does anybody believe it? Certainly no one who’s ever worked in, say, a library.
My guess is that such nonsensical drivel issues forth from the same crowd that continually hypes librarianship as a “hip,” “hot” or “best” career. The same people who are always yammering about the oodles of open, desirable library jobs that are going to be coming available any second now, just as soon as all the Boomers retire or shuffle off to the Great VW Bus In The Sky.
Reality check: I’ve held several professional, MLS librarian positions, at locations in New England and the Pacific Northwest, two of the wealthier regions of the country. In no year during any of those employment stints did I earn more than $38,000. Once, I took a position that paid twenty six thousand dollars per annum – salaried, no less – because it was the best paying job available at the time.
If jobs as easy as those in the library field were actually available for salaries anywhere close to that ridiculous ALA article, I’d still be working in a library right now. Eventually, however, I came to the regrettable conclusion that paying bills was important, and much to my chagrin, had no choice but to take a job that required me to work.
The Fifty Eight Thousand Dollar Library Job is as real as Bigfoot.
(Multiple links via Annoyed Librarian)
UPDATE: Whoops, Chris informs me that I screwed up some terminology, confusing mean with median. “Mean” actually does mean “average,” so it’s possible that a few high-end salaries are artificially inflating that 58K per year number. Of course, according to the same article, the median salary is over 53K per year, which is slightly less, but still wildly out of whack with everything I’ve experienced, salary-wise.
UPDATE PART DEUX: On an unrelated note, I just fixed the blog settings to once again allow anonymous commenting. Not sure when that got changed or how…
Oh, lovely. It looks like my former profession in my former state of residence is in big trouble:
As has happened in other states, cash-strapped schools in Washington state are dropping librarians to save money: This year, Federal Way cut 20 librarian positions. Spokane reduced 10 librarians to half-time. Darrington cut two librarians. A school in Marysville eliminated its half-time librarian.Libraries are open fewer hours, programs minimized, jobs combined. In many cases, part-timers with little formal library training are replacing skilled veterans. In rural Pomeroy, a school now employs a combination custodian-librarian — she opens the library after cleaning the locker rooms.
I managed to secure full-time employment as a school librarian for three years in Seattle, but I was also the network administrator for the school in which I worked. And sure enough, when I left the position, the school changed it to part-time.
In a related note, this is as good a time as any to reveal that I’m no longer a public librarian either. Two weeks ago, I resigned from the position I started in August. I already have a new job lined up, as a systems admin for an IT firm. I plan on volunteering at the local public library after I get settled into the new job, but after ten years in the profession, I’ve discovered that I like libraries a hell of a lot more when I’m not in one 40 hours per week. (Plus, the IT job pays better, and with a 100+ year old house in desperate need of repairs, I need the extra money.)
The question is: can I still consider myself a librarian, even if I’m no longer a library employee?
Last week, the director at my library mentioned that several titles in the ever-popular “For Dummies” series had mysteriously gone missing, and suggested that I order some replacement copies. Shortly thereafter, I logged into our corporate Amazon account and purchased several hundred dollars worth of books.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying particularly close attention to the specific edition of each title I was ordering.
Needless to say, I had not previously been aware that Dummies publishes special teen-tiny editions of their books. Perhaps they’re attempting to monopolize a niche by catering to the previously-untapped hobbit market.
Good news! As of today, I am once again gainfully employed; I was offered and have accepted a position at a public library here in the Portland area. The folks who work there all seem nice, it’s only a ten minute drive from home, the pay’s decent (for Maine, anyway) aaaand – best of all – there’s already a Tech Services Librarian on staff!
Oh, thank you Jeebus, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Zoroaster, Confucius, the whole buncha ya. No more messing with domain servers and mail servers and file servers and firewalls; no more showing library staff how to cut and paste for the zillionth time; no more listening to people bitch when the internet connection goes down. IT’LL BE SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM!!! AAAAAAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA!!!
As of next Monday August 13th, I will be working again, and the money will once again be rolling in. I’m rich, beeatch! No more government cheese for me!
And finally, we begin the final, exhausted, staggering lurch down the homestretch. It’s the final week of school.
At this point, I’m mentally and physically burned out, and am just trying to hold it together. Once the kiddoes are out for the summer, I have two more weeks left at this job to tie up loose ends, reshelve and catalog the boxes of donated books that have piled up in the past few months, and write the volumes of instructions my successor will need to decode the multiple layers of security I’ve slapped on this network. Then, we pack up the car and set off on our cross-country migration.
As time is running short, I’ve been forced to severely curtail my plans to convert all of the library computers over to Ubuntu. Besides, doing so wouldn’t be entirely fair to whoever ends up taking over this job for me. That’s really a decision they should make for themselves. So I’m leaving Edubuntu as a dual boot on two of the computers, along with install cd’s and detailed instructions on how to install it on other computers if so desired.
For the record, the kids who’ve played with the educational games on the Edubuntu test computer I set up really seemed to enjoy themselves, and weren’t at all intimidated by the unfamiliar look of the icons on the screen. As soon as I explained a couple of times that “the big orange globe gets you on the internet, just the big blue E used to,” they easily adjusted to the situation. Kids are a lot more adaptable than adults.
In other Ubuntu news: Kables loves it. The Snarky Penguin, on the other hand, isn’t thrilled, but still likes it better than Windows. And I stumbled across a couple of blogs that have already proven invaluable to a Linux neophyte like myself.
That’s it, I’ve got nothing else. I couldn’t give two shits about the Sopranos finale or Paris Hilton, and even Our Preznit’s latest public embarrassment leaves me unimpressed. Seriously, calling the Pope by the wrong title doesn’t even rank in the Top 1,000 of Dubya Brainfarts. Unlike most of his fuckups, nobody died because of it, and the only person directly affected was an 80 year old ex-Nazi and a gaggle of his paid hangers-on and suckfish. Big whoop.
Ever since making the decision to move back to Maine, I’ve been wondering what the hell to do about employment once I get there. Maine is a small, rural, fairly poor state, and the public libraries don’t pay very well. Moreover, since the house is in Portland, I’m necessarily limited to towns within a reasonable commuting distance, further limiting my options. To be blunt, I can’t afford to be picky; I’ve sent a resume in for practically every posting that appears on the state library job site.
One of those jobs was for a school librarian in a posh private school quite close to home. I sent in a resume, had an initial phone interview with the head librarian, and waited to hear back about whether or not I had made the cut for a second interview. It was indicated to me that I would be hearing from them within a few days.
So I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited…
Finally, after having sent a couple of unanswered emails to the director requesting an update, I heard back from the head librarian: they had already brought in the interviewees for the second round, done the interviews, decided on a candidate, and offered them the job. In fact, the winner had started their new job the previous week. The head librarian was embarrassed that no one in administration had sent me my rejection letter, and apologized profusely. And sure enough, the letter arrived two days later.
Big deal, right? People get turned down for jobs all the time, and employers are sometimes lax about getting back to job candidates, especially those who didn’t make the cut anyway. So what?
One small problem: THEY MAILED THE REJECTION LETTER TO MY CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT.
(more…)
The post you are currently reading is the first one composed on my newly Microsoft-free laptop. Yes, that’s right: after years of grumbling about The Redmond Borg Collective and their crappy, bug-ridden, vulnerable, proprietary OS and software, I finally took the plunge and installed Linux. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of Open Source software and have used it with Windows whenever possible, but I was leery of Linux. While I’m reasonably tech-savvy, I had little interest in an OS that required me to constantly type in command prompts and scour the interwebs looking for drivers, and the concept of installing software by downloading and compiling tarballs (or hairballs or whatever the hell those things are called) made my eyes glaze over.
The beauty of Open Source software, however, is that someone is always working on it and figuring out new and innovative ways to make it better. There are many different versions of Linux, but Ubuntu is the one I settled on, because it seems the most user-friendly and similar to the familiar Windows or Mac “point and click” environment. And it’s easy to install; simply download it from their site, burn it onto a cd, pop the cd in and reboot your computer. During the install, all you have to do is enter a few basic configuration details (username, password, time/date, language, etc) and it does the rest for you.
Since the school I work for is nonprofit and has to generate all its operating expenses through fundraising, I had a further reason to mess with Linux: to save money. Microsoft’s exorbitant costs, licensing fees, and ever-more odious “validation” requirements are a major concern to an organization as cash-strapped as ours. Sure, Microsoft does donate a lot of software to schools and libraries, but each new version of Windows gets exponentially larger and hogs more system resources and processing power, necessitating the purchase of newer and faster computers. It’s an expense we simply cannot afford.
Because this is a school, the version of Ubuntu I eventually gravitated to is Edubuntu, which comes with quite a bit of preinstalled educational software. It also comes with Open Office, a free software suite that replaces Microsoft Office (which retails for anywhere from $200 to $500 per copy, depending on the version.) Open Office can save documents in Microsoft Office formats (meaning you won’t lose all your documents if you switch over) and has versions available for both Windows and Linux. For my browser, I use Mozilla, and after consulting with always-helpful tech guru Kables, I settled on Amarok and VLC as my music and DVD players, respectively. Linux is much more virus-proof than Windows, but I installed the free version of Avast Antivirus just to be safe.
The greatest aspect of this conversion is that my laptop, an old Gateway Solo 9300 with a Pentium III chip and a 20GB hard drive, now runs much faster than it did with Windows 2000. (Due to its age and lack of RAM and processor speed, I never even bothered trying to upgrade to XP.) My home computer, on the other hand, is fairly new and came with XP installed. Since I’ve had no major problems with it so far, I will probably leave it as-is for awhile. However, once Microsoft stops supporting XP in order to force everyone to upgrade to that turd sandwich Vista, I will ditch The Borg entirely and never look back.
According to a recent survey, Americans hate their jobs more than ever:
The trend is strongest among workers under the age of 25, less than 39 percent of whom are satisfied with their jobs.Workers age 45 to 54 have the second lowest level of satisfaction (less than 45 percent), according a survey conducted by The Conference Board…
(snip)
Overall, dissatisfaction has spread among all workers, regardless of age, income or residence. Twenty years ago, the first time the survey was conducted, 61 percent of all Americans said they were satisfied with their jobs…
(link via The Culture Ghost)
Hmm, couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that real wages for American workers are declining relative to inflation, and have been doing so since the early 1970’s, could it? And it certainly couldn’t have anything to do with our illustrious Preznit’s ongoing attempts to destroy the last tattered shreds of the social safety net that his father and Reagan hadn’t eviscerated already.
Nah, I didn’t think so either.
Speaking of job dissatisfaction: I’ve tendered my resignation here at the ol’ liberry and will be leaving at the end of the school year in June. However, in my case the reason isn’t so much disgruntlement as burnout. While I take an inordinate amount of pride in the fact that I’m doing something to help the most forgotten members of our society, and that I’m not toiling away in an office to make someone else richer, this job is amazingly stressful. Working with traumatized kids is such an emotional drain that I need a change of scene. Some of my coworkers have been working at this school for almost two decades, and I honestly haven’t the slightest clue how they do it.
The other reason for my decision to quit is a happier one: the fiance and I are moving back to Maine to live in the house she inherited from her grandfather. Library jobs in Maine are fairly scarce right now, but the town in which we will live is the largest one in the state, with a six-branch public library and several small colleges. If I’m going to find a library job anywhere in the state, it’ll be there.
I have moved coast-to-coast three times now (from Maine to Seattle in 1997, Seattle to New Hampshire in 2002, and back to Seattle again in 2004.) This impending move is the first time since 1997 that I’ve felt I’m moving towards something, rather than running away from something.
Two days ago, this city received perhaps a quarter inch of snow and sleet. This has been followed by an unusual “cold snap” that has kept temperatures down around freezing.
Because of this, I am now enjoying my second consecutive day off from work, because the entire City of Seattle school system has been shut down by the “winter emergency.”
The local news stations are predicting an additional 1-3 inches of snow tonight, at which point I fully expect them to change their hourly “Deep Freeze ‘06” updates to “Blizzard ‘06” updates.
I may never have to work again!
