I was offered the job!
That’s right! Starting next month,* I’ll be working on a different floor! With windows.
Sunglasses and vitamin D, here I come!
That’s not the only difference, or I wouldn’t have bothered, but it isn’t an insignificant one. Neither is stepping away from the enclosed environs of the Archives—breathing history is tough on chronic sinusitis.**
I’ll have to work one night a week,*** travel more between branches, and trade in my personal workstation and cubicle space for a login and a couple of assigned drawers.
But the questions will be quicker and the patrons will have different interests, and most of my new duties will be my very favorite parts of library work.
I will be moving around instead of waiting in the basement lower level for petitioners like the Mushroom of Wisdom. And no one will ever ask me how to find genealogical proof that their great-great-great grandmother was born a Cherokee Princess—which is not and never has been a Real Thing™—right here in Pottawattomie territory.^ If they do, I’ll direct them to the person who replaces me.^^
And there’s a rumor I might get to select adult graphic novels.
I am overcome, y’all.
Overcome.
_______________________________
*Assuming that the person who left that department for another department doesn’t want her job back after her probationary period is up.
**I can’t claim it as the cause, though—I grew up in southern Ohio and “Cincinnati Sinus” is no joke.
***I’m working one a month, now, which is why I can never remember when it is.
^Which at the time would have been approximately than 400 miles north of the nearest Cherokee settlement—give or take, as the United States spent a lot of time and resources keeping most native nations unsettled. But that’s a rant for another time.
^^Again assuming the person who left the ref department won’t return, bumping us all back to our original places like an Occupational Newton’s Cradle . . .
Earful of Cider 