So you want to become a librarian?

Me at 46: I want to dismantle the machinery that makes trillionaires.

Or: is there a job… where I can just live my life? Like, spend time with friends and doing hobbies and still getting paid?

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.

Librarians require a master's and make like $34k a year.

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

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.

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.

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.

me at 50 after the latest round of cutbacks and layoffs, "are there still jobs that will allow me to pay my bills?"

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

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.

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 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).

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

I actually started climbing the ladder and to be honest, I fucking hate it and am looking for a way out. I have never dealt with so many people that are willing to sacrifice their own dignity to be a sycophant for the sake of money.

I've climbed the corporate ladder and traveled all over the world until I got near the top where the nepotism is thick. Said 'fuck that' and bailed out early.

New plan: "Work for myself." Took me a decade to get here because of little things like health care and capital.

Been on my own for almost 2 years now and it is glorious.

If I could organize the arkane library daily with my current salary, I would be happy

Don't librarians in the US have to have masters degrees? I thought it was another underpaid very competitive career path where you had to wait for people to retire to find a job.

I actually had a job shelving books as a teenager. It is to date the best job I ever had. No one bothered me. I just took books from the return slots at the library and put them back for a few hours after school. Sometimes I even dared to get a list of reservations to find and shelve elsewhere.

Get your library science degree now, there are only a few accredited programs. I thought about doing this earlier this year and was surprised at how complicated it actually was to become a librarian.

IT security is like that. It's really boring until it isn't.

Honestly, at 45 with a very patchy CV because I was forced to become a full time carer more than once (fuck cancer), I'm probably fucked.

Feel like I might as well flush my degrees down the toilet. Luckily I live in Europe, so I didn't have to go into a huge amount of debt for them.

That's life I suppose. Sticking around for the life ending asteroid Hollywood has promised us.