NYTimes.com Article: The Librarian's Image, Unrevised

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The Librarian's Image, Unrevised
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/29/business/29MYMY.html

October 29, 2000
MY MONEY, MY LIFE
By KAREN G. SCHNEIDER

I AM a librarian, a part of a feminized profession with a median
starting salary that recently topped $30,000. Despite a growing
demand for our services, major areas of the country are unable to
keep or attract employees for their public libraries. This must
change if librarianship is to survive. 

 But after reading a spate of articles about young
whatever-somethings complaining about feeling poor when they're
earning six figures, or apple-cheeked billionaires bemoaning
spiritual emptiness, I would like to note that wading in the low
end of the professional salary scale is not without advantages.

 Those of us at the bottom of the hierarchy are not only free of
the chains that bind fashion victims; our unwritten, excruciatingly
wholesome dress code also helps our image as people with whom the
most confidential information can be entrusted. Would you feel
comfortable confiding your most intimate medical or marital
problems to some pretty young thing in a Prada outfit? I don't
think so.

 Try this test. The next time a conference of the American Library
Association comes to a city near you, drive around and look for my
people. Do you see the earnest, clean-cut middle-age folk strolling
on a Saturday morning? The bearded males in tweedy garb, the women
in long skirts or practical slack sets, and all wearing Rockports?
That's us. 

 This image serves us well during conference travels. Dragging
canvas bags filled with conference tchotchkes and clasping copies
of "The Velveteen Rabbit" close to our moth-eaten sweaters, we've
been known to arouse a sense of pity in the most pompous maître d's
at restaurants. I might add, though, that we tip very generously,
as well we should when we're ordering five dinners for eight
people.
 Reduced expectations work well in other settings, too. There is my
auto mechanic, who, even as I approach an income in the
mid-$40,000's   making me a tycoon by local librarian standards  
refuses to change the cup holder in my serviceable, seven-year-old
Honda because it's too expensive (even though, as he points out, I
will be driving this car for five more years). I could go elsewhere
to have the work done, but how can I not be loyal to a mechanic so
concerned about my expenses? 

 Sure, it would be nice to have a jaunt on my own yacht, to learn
to use an escargot fork or to drink a wine so expensive I have
nosebleeds just thinking about it. But we who ride the clattering,
square-wheeled caboose of the economy's bullet train are at least
liberated from the expectations of a money-crazed, high-octane
lifestyle.

 While others work 100 hours a week and exhaust the remaining time
by buying anything so long as it's expensive, chipping barnacles
from their boats and comparing themselves with one another, my
colleagues and I actually stay home and read books, cover to cover.


 Call me a loser, but I've actually read the same book twice in the
same week, just because I liked it, then took time to discuss it
with friends. 

  
 YES, many in my profession   and in other helping professions like
the ministry, education and child care   need much better income
and benefits. And it is the high crime of the new economy that so
many service workers lack basic health care or retirement packages
while the rest of the country is on one hectic, manic splurge.

 I wish that it were easier for me to buy a home, or that I had
medical options other than the lie called managed care. And I worry
about my colleagues who must clothe and educate children, care for
infirm relatives or simply pay next month's bills. We deserve real
pay for our work.

 Yet I also know that when the market crash came in 1929, men leapt
from window ledges not because they were lonely or spiritually
unfulfilled, or because they wished they had spent more time with
their children. They committed suicide because money had become the
center of their universe, and when bad times came, they had nothing
left to fall back on. 

 I may not own a monogrammed handbag, but at my core, I know who I
am, sensible shoes and all, and I would not trade that for
everything in the world.  
The writer is the assistant director for technology at the
Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, N.Y. Submit your
account of struggling or succeeding as a worker, consumer, investor
or entrepreneur to My Money, Money & Business, The New York Times,
229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. E-mail:
mymoney _at__ nytimes.com. All submissions become the property of The
Times. They may be edited and may be republished in any medium. 
     



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