it’s a little scary in there

We’ve had a new Adult Services Librarian for the last few months. Except she isn’t a librarian. Has never worked in a library. Hasn’t used the library since moving into the area three years ago. Has never read a book.

Ok, the last isn’t true. Unfortunately all of the rest is.

She is somewhere beyond unqualified into a vast new realm of, “Seriously why is she here?!”

She is not a bad person. She’s eager and friendly and means well. She’s also scatterbrained and easily overwhelmed and unable to follow oral and written instructions.

I could complain and complain and gripe and complain some more about her. But that’s not my point today.

“So what is?” you ask. (And thank you for playing along.)

My point is it was very obvious from day 1 that this was not the job for her. Yes, there is a lot to know to work even a basic entry level position in a library — patrons will ask / demand assistance for all kinds of shit from anyone they think might could maybe be library staff — buuut people do learn it. I mean, librarians are a thing and we do eventually come to know what we’re doing. Or we learn to spectacularly wing it.

Newbie, as we’ll call her here, was very obviously never going to do anything but muddle through the basic tasks and with only a 50-50 chance of doing it right. And that really was obvious right from the start.

But S- kept patiently trying to train her, adding new skills to her list of those she would never master. Mainly so S- could quit trying to straddle both her old Adult Services position and new Assistant Director role. Surely Newbie would learn!

Well, no. Because she just didn’t have a librarian’s brain.

Which finally gets us to today’s real topic: What essential inherent quality makes a person able to become, after much training and practice and experience, a librarian?

Librarians ultimately want to sort and arrange and store away information. Which means we want to see it. All of it. All of the information in the universe. And them we need to understand how each bit connects to every other bit — for cross-reference purposes, of course.

That is a very specific mind indeed.

Imagine, if you will, a murder board. A really intricate one with several different colored threads connecting many many seemingly random items.

That’s probably what my brain looks like on a microscopic level. Except it’s more than one murder board. It is potentially infinite murder boards, with room to add more. And they all connect. Which requires more than three or even four puny dimensions. Ten . . . eleven . . . maybe thirteen dimensions. Probably a lot more.

So that’s what a librarian’s brain — my brain — is. Infinite murder boards connecting via infinity + 1 different colored threads in a minimum of thirteen dimensions.