First Jobs

Posted to Work on 22 February 2007.

by Doug Stone—Age 49—Ellington, CT

That buzz startles me again from the bad ballast, standing out above the low hum of the rest of the fixtures. Back here in the stacks, you lose your senses, like in one of those deprivation tanks. Shelf reading, making sure books are filed in proper Dewey Decimal order, can kill a man. I have a stealth copy of The Cheerleader propped at the end of the stack, my reward for staying awake through several hundred spines. A few quick paragraphs of titillation, then it’s back to work.

“”—and how dare you threaten delinquent patrons with jail? Do you know what jail is like?” The words drift back here, standing out above the quiet. I triangulate on the sound coming from the main desk, and ease my way toward it. I see a gentleman in a trench coat waving a sheet of paper.

“Now sir, don’t go and get all upset. We didn’t mean to get nasty, we just want our books back,” replies my boss, Miss Snarky, giving him a sharp look “That letter is just one of our gentle reminders.”

The rebuttal took effect. The man’s posture slumps. Tossing the book in question onto the desk along with a dollar bill, he slinks out.

“What are you looking at? Get back to work,” hisses the Snark to me. So I walk back to 818.05, Miscellaneous Writings. With sealed, tinted glass in the few windows I can see from here, and humming HVAC, it could be Africa hot or Arctic cold outside.

Lunchtime, my stomach tells me. I leave the stacks and take the stairwell to the Old Section. This is the original building, housing the donated, decaying book collections of townsfolk. Mold and mildew threaten to leap off the walls and onto my bologna at my wooden table for one. My footsteps echo off the hard green walls as I stride over to get a drink from the fountain.

Lunch over, I head back upstairs. An afternoon of shelf reading drags by. I prepare to leave, and Miss Snarky stops me at the desk.

“Here, I have your first paycheck,” she mumbles as she digs it out of a drawer. “Remember, minimum wage does not apply to farm workers and government employees.”

As I walk out, I tear open the envelope. Twenty dollars for two weeks of part-time work. Whoopee.

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