They all look like I’d get my pants pocket caught in them (I’m blessed with a special combination of hips and height. My taller boyfriend doesn’t have this problem.)
My preferred door handles are the upsy/downsy ones. You can still open them with a flexible leg, but they don’t grasp for my pockets.
Or a few years later: the microwave forcibly logged you off. (microwave interfered with the WiFi).
or (at the worst) try and assassinate Reagan.
At my college, at least, we’re very undergrad-focused. So the professors tend to request things that are good for those sorts of classes. There’s about 3,700 academic libraries in the USA.
We also subscribe to some large collections of ebooks, which we don’t individually curate. We have the ability to add on individual books to our ebook collection, but most come in, say, the EBSCOhost eBooks Academic Subscription Collection. I have Opinions about ebooks vs physical books in a library setting (mostly, I don’t like renting books and prefer something a publisher can’t take away on a whim). But ebooks sure are convenient for students, especially if they’re taking classes remotely. COVID was a push towards ebooks.
Mini rant: our physical book collection needs weeding, but we don’t have the budget we’d like for new books. Whenever I pull together a display for, say, LGBTQ Pride, I have to decide whether to include a copy of “Poetry of Sappho” from the 1930s that looks like it’s from the 1930s[derogatory]–no dust cover, just blue paperboard. No young adult’s going to walk by a worn blue rectangle and say “yes, I want to pick that up and read it”.
I want to put together an attractive display and a lot of my options are ugly.
And weeding’s complicated, too. You can’t just say “oh, this is 30 years old, get rid of it”. That tends to work in Science/Tech/Medicine, but a 30-year-old biography might be the only one written on a person. Is there a newer one we should get? Is the older one bad for some irredeemable way, or is it bad in an interesting way? (example: written by someone super biased in favor of the subject, but the author’s biases are intriguing, or they’re the only biographer to actually talk to the subject, that sort of thing)
That’s how it ought to be done in academic libraries. It does take a lot of librarians. You have a librarian for each subject area, which can be pretty granular depending on the size/budget of the library. My academic library has a business librarian who focuses on acquiring and weeding the business section. She has an undergrad degree in something businessy and an MSLis.
Now, my academic library has been subject to funding cuts and so we don’t do everything we ought to do, especially in areas that aren’t major majors at our school, which is frustrating AF. We rely more on professors suggesting acquisitions.
Public libraries have a broader remit, so often can go with purchasing what’s requested by their patrons and what’s on lists of good new books. They still have to know their subject matter to weed properly, especially in the nonfiction areas. Fiction tends to be weeded based on condition and circulation stats, especially in public libraries. (weeding is getting rid of books that no longer suit the collection. Easy examples: children’s book that was dropped in the mud. children’s book that still lists Pluto as a planet).
Oh! As a librarian, you can also get pre-release versions of books to evaluate for your library. It’s a nice perk to read things months before it comes out. (you have to request them from the publisher, but publishers like sending these to librarians because librarians buy lots of books and talk to other people that buy lots of books)
part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they’re worth acquiring for the collection. So, you’d look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there’s anything they’d suggest. You research the author, find out if they’re involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.
Yes, that sounds trivial, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.
Yes, but you can work in a library without being a librarian. Check out code4lib. It’s a (free online) techie conference with associated slack channel, and it’s for folks that, roughly, code for libraries. Tbh, I think the techie route to working in a library is easier than the master’s degree. Source: engineering undergrad, have my mslis, work in a library, current position doesn’t require an mslis.
Your one skill as a child is being “the easy one”, meaning you don’t ask for anything, unlike your more needy younger sibling. So you just keep not asking for things and your needs go unmet. And anytime a child needs to show flexibility, it’s you because you’re the older one. No, you don’t get to blow out the candles on your birthday cake alone because your brother wants to, it’d be nice if you let him help because you’re the older one. By the time you’re 10 you realize you’ll always be the older one. It sucks.
I do that, too, when I’m in a shared chair. I think it’s because my feet don’t reach the floor in chairs that aren’t adjusted for my height. Also, I’m autistic, hyper flexible, and have poor proprioception, so sitting on my legs gives me good feedback on where my limbs are.
My office chair is a kneeling chair, and I tend to sit with my feet where the knees should go. (I swap into office slippers, so it’s not outside shoes on my chair.)
The last time I went car shopping, it was as the ride for my carless roommate (we were dating, but he introduced me to the car rep as his ride and roommate). He ended up talking to a manager about a car and the manager kept bad-mouthing my car, talking about how unsafe it was, etc. I just kept knitting next to him because the whole situation was not my problem, but I was confused until my roommate said pointedly “you’re not going to get my roommate’s car as a trade-in”. I got up to help myself to their snacks and coffee.
He did not get a car from that dealership.
It sucked being the kid at summer camp that never got mail. I figured jail was similar, so I made sure he had mail. I didn’t always have much to say, so often I’d send a greeting card filled with writing or sometimes just a post card. The act of sending/getting mail was the important bit.
Back when my brother was in jail, I was personally boosting that percentage by writing to him every week. Sometimes, he’d even write back. (some/most jails are wicked restrictive on correspondence and Internet access, and a letter is much cheaper than a jail phone conversation.)
My local ace is friendly. They have a store dog, too. It’s great.
I keep a couple jugs around for in case we lose power. We’re on well water and without power we don’t have tap water.
Last time I was the pickup person for a surgery, the surgery went well and fast, then the first recovery room (the one where I wasn’t allowed to visit) took 4 hours. Poor friend was just so slow to get his mental faculties back after anesthesia. I blame his redheaded genes.
Ah, you’re only like 5 years younger than me. I work in a college library and the young adults keep making me feel my millenial age, so maybe I over-explained.
Were you on dial-up, too? That dialtone just announced to everyone you were getting online, no way to hide.
Nah, it was an application on family computer. You know, the computer in the corner of the dining room where your parents and baby brother could read over your shoulder. (I had my own computer in my room, but it didn’t even have a network card or modem.)
It’s more like Google chat or your contacts list of folks you SMS with. People you probably know from high school and nowadays you’d text, but AOL Instant Messager was free, used a device with a full keyboard, and didn’t require a cell phone which you didn’t have because it was 2001.
My partner has other partners and it’s more about emotional connection and support. From my point of view, it’s also nice to get him out of the house so I can cover all the surfaces with hobbies.
If it was about sex he’d probably not still be with me after 18 years, since I am uninterested in sex.
Living the dream! My gaming group picked up Big Walk when it came out but we’ve but yet had time to play together.