My "you might be a librarian if" list

You might be a public librarian if:

All the copies of a book are checked out, and you have to stop yourself from running home and grabbing your personal copy to give to the nice disappointed patron.

Your version of heroin is hearing that someone loved a book you recommended.

You organize the books in your home library for fun.

You make less with your master's degree than many people do with their high-school degree.

You earned said masters degree so that you could spend your days showing people how to use their Yahoo email account. (First step, open a Gmail account instead. Yahoo sucks bricks.)

You laugh until you cry when you hear the phrase "librarian shortage." Then you go twist a few of the pins you keep in your ALA voodoo doll.

You secretly bristle when you hear the term "librarian" applied to just anyone who works in a library, up to and including janitorial staff. You realize this is an elitist behavior, but you just don't care.

Patrons mistake you for a tax adviser. Or financial adviser. Or lawyer. Or doctor. Or secretary. Or trash-thrower-awayer. All are flattering except for those last two. They are not so much.

Parents mistake you for a babysitter.

You dream about orchestrating a fake kidnapping in the children's section to teach people A Very Important Lesson but know that parents would probably not even notice anything was happening.

You have become adept at recognizing various psychiatric disorders.

You get to learn way, way too much about people's personal lives--usually by way of the bellowing cell phone conversations they're having right in front of you.

You get so used to reminding people about appropriate behavior that you have to stop yourself from doing it when you're off-duty. And maybe sometimes you don't stop yourself, and then your husband is embarrassed to be with you.

You develop an eye twitch 5 minutes before the junior high gets out--whether or not you can see the clock. Your body just knows.

You are happy when you find sex books hidden in random parts of the library, because it means a teenager is learning about sex from an actual book rather than from their idiot friends.

You sometimes get to make wallets and flowers out of duct-tape with a bunch of teenagers and call it work.

You got to read the last Harry Potter before anybody else.

You accost strangers in public about the books they are reading.

You cannot possibly narrow it down to one favorite book.

Are there any I'm forgetting?

Posted in: library gossip