Skip to main content

Kevin the Teenager

We're all normal, sensible adults, right? Inanimate objects should not provoke feelings of rage, or the desire to destroy them. We should be able to laugh in the face of small irritations, while congratulating ourselves on maintaining our inner Librarian Zen.

And generally, we do. We field queries, wrestle databases, and wrangle information merrily, with good humour and cheerful Librarian Face* held firmly intact.

But then comes that day, that terrible, terrible day we law librarians dread. Oh yes...the day that the Yellow Tax Handbooks and Orange Tax Handbooks arrive.

Oh, they are fiendish, fiendish things, yet they merely add to the heap of Evil Books in the Library!

Between the Orange and Yellow (which have some disturbing issues), and the various collapsible Butterworths handbooks with their covers made of paper mache, which are now joined by the massive Chambers UK, the library is awash in schlumpy books, determined to slide slowly off the shelves. Or, in the case of Chambers UK, books that can't actually be put on shelves at all, unless kept encased in their cardboard shells. Books which, for added fun, are so tightly jammed in that it's virtually impossible to remove the guide from the shell without hauling the whole thing off the shelf and shaking it upside down vigorously to break the strange suction effect, while holding one hand over the Bar guide so it doesn't make a break for freedom. Then, when you've figured out how to find anything in it, and want to put it back, it's another wrestle with the cardboard shell, with the bonus of now having to keep perfectly straight and parallel the pages of a 1600 page book with a soft cover with one hand, while using the other to hold the Bar guide out of the way, again.

Meanwhile, in the background, is the soft hiss of tax handbooks, slowly sliding down the shelf...

It's enough to turn anyone into Kevin the Teenager, provoking outbursts of muttered "I hate you", and "This is so unfair!" whenever you're forced to go near the damn things.

Excuse me, I'm off to go sulk in my room.


*Librarian Face - the curse/blessing of librarians the world over. The face that involuntarily says "Can I help you?", night and day. More details here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
So true!

Popular posts from this blog

Careering along

When I look around at the activities of information professional groups, it seems that there’s a disparity. There’s quite often a lot of support and funding available for those who’re just starting out in the profession, but a desert of nothingness for those of us who’re “just getting on with it”. If you’re a new professional, you have lots of groups to support you as you progress in your early career, various prize funds available for essay and report writing, access to bursaries for conference attendance, eligibility for awards for being new and enthusiastic. But what do you get when you’re past that bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed first 5 years (5 years seems to be the approximate cut-off point for becoming “established” and no longer new). What happens when you’ve already received a bursary from an organisation earlier in your career and so wouldn’t be eligible for one now, meaning you’re not able to attend events or training? When you’re heavily involved in a project but not at

What's in a name?

In the case of this blog, it's a name that had no particular thought or planning behind it - I had no idea whether I would actually want to keep it going, what I would blog about, or that anyone would ever read it. Well, it's almost 4 years later (17th June 2007 is blog birthday, if we're counting), and the blog's still here, so I think we can now safely assume that it's probably going to be sticking around. And the name's been getting on my nerves a bit...you have no idea the amount of people who have found this blog looking for ladies called Jennie Law or Jenny Law. Personally, I'm not actually called Jennie Law, so I'm no help to these poor searchers, although for the right fee I could maybe consider pretending to be... I also don't blog a huge amount about law: I'm not a lawyer, I just have the job of finding stuff for lawyers. Sometimes that process amuses me, sometimes it annoys me, and I blog about it. Sometimes I write about library is

Losing the professionalism

So, recently, CILIP apparently sent out an email regarding a consultation on a change of brand image, and name. I say apparently, as despite being a member, I never got this email. When I went to the website to log in and check why it wasn't sent to me, it didn't let me log in. I tried a password reset, and that email came through, so it *can* send emails to me...but the password it sent won't let me log in. I’m losing the will to keep trying. Overall, this is kind of symptomatic of how I feel about CILIP, and how useless its IT systems are.... Anyway, the consultation is on changing CILIP’s currently, clunky and meaningless name (picked as the best of a previous bad lot, as David McMenemy showed with this link to the 2000 consultation results ) to something more meaningful and relevant is open. If you want to take part, it’s here . I was a good girl, and pootled over yesterday to take part, and after filling in all the bumph, I got to view the glorious options. Oh. My.