Member-only story
How I Lost My Job at the Public Library
I got fired from the public library for putting away magazines.
This was in 1980 when people still read magazines, and libraries still stored recent back issues in cardboard binders, labeled by year. My branch kept five years of popular titles on their second level, clearly visible to patrons seated in the first-floor research area through an open design space (see photo).
I had already made waves as a lowly “page” earlier that year. Pages worked after school and on weekends, taking carts filled with unsorted books and restocking the shelves. Our supervisor was a high-functioning man with Down’s Syndrome with a non-existent sense of humor, who made sure everyone followed the rules.
It took approximately 30–45 minutes to empty a cart if you were in constant motion, as you meandered from section to section. Unsorted books might take you across the entire traverse of the building. Or you might get lucky and they’d all be fiction, housed upstairs.
When there were more pages on duty than carts, the supervisor would assign certain sections and have us go shelf by shelf, arranging them correctly by the Dewey Decimal system. Occasionally, some lazy page nearing the end of his or her shift would “dump” the final contents of their cart at the end of a particular shelf. As the lowest-priority staff, we were…
