The Librarian Has Left the Building
By Rob Huffman
People—specifically older people–always told me I’d know when it was time. They said this particular knowledge would announce itself clearly and irrefutably, with a slap-in-the-face certitude.
“But how?” I’d ask.
“Oh, you’ll just know,” they’d repeat. Then smile. Ruefully? Passive aggressively? Both?
They meant I’d know when it was time to retire. Time to end my career. Time to realize the moment has come for my earthly sojourn to pull out of station three—one to go!—on the birth-school-work-death line.
With apologies to Captain Kirk, retirement is the real final frontier—not a voyage on, but rather the end of the enterprise. Being put out to pasture. Escaping the rat race. (Though honestly, are the post-work misadventures of Medicare, mental slippage, and all the other delights of encroaching decrepitude any less a Running of the Rodents?)
In any case, I think my day of reckoning is fast approaching. And I do, in fact, know it, as was foretold by those so many erstwhile Jeremiahs. The glimmerings gather, the inklings intrude. I’ll shall soon be forced to write that de rigueur email farewell, largely false and certainly melodramatic, that assures my most likely indifferent coworkers that it has been my singular pleasure and honor to know and work with them all.
You might still be wondering, as I once did, just how I’ve come to know the end is near. I doubt, though, especially in this day and age, that you’ll be surprised by the answer, because it wasn’t anything internal, no gut instinct.
It was Google.
***
A few years back, my school division—I’m a high school librarian—transitioned to the Google world. Consequently, we public school employees now use Google Mail and all the associated Google tools that have so ruthlessly but effectively eclipsed competitors. We create Google Docs, confer via Google Meet, store and share files on Google Drive. To move into this new information paradigm seamlessly and efficiently, librarians were expected (as techno- and/or information-ambassadors) to become proficient with the entire suite of the Google for Educators professional toolkit.
Google offered brief courses and culminating tests—timed and observed via our laptops’ Orwellian cameras—that would authorize successful testers to attach the much-sought Google Certified Educator badge to our signature blocks. Actually, two levels of attainment were possible: Google Certified Educator Level 1 and, for those keyboard wizards who aspired, Icarus-like, to soar even higher, Google Certified Educator Level 2.
As a reasonably intelligent adult and veteran of tests taken (observed and unobserved), I was full of a complacent and entitled certainty that soon my signature block would include both of these Google’s Educator cap feathers. Reality, that cruelest of mistresses, had other plans. Not only did I not achieve Google Certified Educator Level 2 status, I failed to achieve Level 1. Dear reader, my face burns as I write this, but I failed to pass the Level 1 test THREE TIMES!!! At which point Google humiliatingly, but understandably, determined that I, as a thrice-failer, was a moron and not suitable to affix any Google imprimatur to my name.
Google only allows three attempts at passing the test, and I went down swinging. Actually, not swinging: Just watching one unanswerable question after another sail past me, bat on my shoulder. My only solace was that my failure was anonymous—excepting Big Brother’s amused spectating—and didn’t require a quick and head-hanging exit from any actual testing room.
In any case, my abject failure to become a Google Certified Educator was a harbinger that my working days as a librarian were numbered. My public shaming by Google—the bright red, Prynne-ish F I felt I was wearing—identified me as a marked man who couldn’t even officially affix “Educator” to his emails. To make things worse, every time I opened even the most innocent of emails from a library colleague, I was forced to see their Google badges, those preening Levels 1 and 2, leaving me with a wholly unintentional but no less painful e-chiding. My time, much like the sand in that terrifying hourglass in The Wizard of Oz, was running out. The flying monkeys were closing in.
I should note here that my fellow librarians have long been aware of my technological shortcomings and have always been willing to help me use equipment or software that I find generationally challenging. They are all kind and selfless, as indeed are most folks in education. Still, though they would never say it out loud, their eyes and mannerisms speak—kindly and selflessly—soul-crushing volumes: “Maybe it’s time to pack it in, Rob. Don’t shuffleboard and 4:30 early bird dinners sound kinda nice?”
There are few things more disheartening than pity delivered with doe-eyed compassion. Like revenge, pity is best served cold. When my final workday arrives, I don’t want cakes, sentimental speeches, clichéd toasts, or gifts of joint-soothing bath salts. I’d prefer we effect the transition quickly and unemotionally, mafia-style. I’ll step into the bucket of cement with dignity and on my own terms and wait for that final nudge off the end of the dock.
I think I know how silent film stars must have felt as the 1920s drew to a close: A little scared, a little disdainful of the world’s vicissitudes, simultaneously imperious and confused, working hard to convince myself that my discombobulation will pass.
Surely the “talkies” are just a bumptious fad.
Screw Google badges anyway.
There are days when I feel the way the stodgy and superseded always feel, pretty sure the old ways of doing things were just fine if not better. New methodologies of learning and teaching strike me as both ludicrously complicated and pedagogically questionable. Gadgets and games seem to have replaced cornerstone activities like reading, discussion, and writing. Why shift paradigms if they ain’t broken?
However—and despite my irritation and protests—I have to admit that my county library colleagues, most of whom were not even born when I graduated from high school, have somehow managed to learn these new inscrutable systems and procedures with the infuriating ease of all digital natives. The new ways of teaching suit these non-codgers just fine, even that cursed Google for Educators suite.
***
Like many sons, my views on retirement were colored—prefigured—by my dad’s experience. My dad was a cop, rising to the rank of captain on the U.S. Park Police in Washington, D.C., a law enforcement officer in an exciting city during exciting times. He was there the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and he witnessed firsthand the funeral processions of both JFK and RFK.
It is one thing to witness history and quite another to be consigned to it. Which is to say, my dad did not retire particularly well. He was both restless and indolent—could spend whole days, after sleeping almost to noon, just piddling in his garage. He had interests—Civil War artifacts, old movies—but pursued them listlessly, without any particular enthusiasm. I think he was emasculated by retirement and felt that a man who no longer brought home a regular paycheck was lesser somehow than his nose-to-the-grindstone brethren.
As his feckless and often unemployed son, I scoffed at my old man’s sad example of the protestant work ethic. At 25, I couldn’t imagine anything better than never having to work again. How could he possibly fear lazing about, watching late-night TV? And yet, some 40 years later, I find my dad’s post-work melancholy far more comprehensible.
When I first began working in my school’s library two decades ago, things operated much as they had in my own childhood. There were only superficial differences between school libraries of the early 2000s and those I had used as a child in the late 1960s. The word “library” remained just a synonym for “books.” One whispered in the library; silence was an unquestioned expectation. With a librarian’s help, children found and checked out books with the prim and humorless understanding that they’d be returned not only on time but in the exact condition they were in when loaned. The settled dust on the school library shelves was the very patina of knowledge, fairy sprinkles of erudition. While it would be exaggerating to say the students of this era eagerly trooped into the library to grab the latest books, business was steady and the library was thought important and essential, even a little forbidding, like a church. When a book report was due (and that’s all we wrote back then: The title of my book is Tom Sawyer and it was written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was also known as….”), it required a trip to the library, the quicker the better, to find the slimmest permissible novel.
Truth be told, I like the way modern libraries operate. And you’d be right to say it sure doesn’t sound like it, grumpy old-timer! Nonetheless, I do. I may be a little out of step in knowing how they operate. Their shibboleths might boggle me. But they are now more inclusive places. Friendlier. Prim, humorless shushers are gone; convivial chitchat has lost its status as one of the seven deadly sins. Not all who visit need leave with books. Nor even peruse them while there. Possibly the chitchat was the whole reason for the visit? So be it! Human connection and engagement—and isn’t this the point of books as well?—was sought and found. Chitchat is talk, and talk is communication. So, kids talking, laughing, fooling around—is this really so horrible? There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your dusty (patina, my ass!) books. The riches of the world come both bound and unbound.
And doesn’t this just sound like some old guy, inconsistent in his views, wildly pinballing from one opinion to another? All the hell over the place? Kvetching, grumbling, then out of nowhere, gushing about current kids despite their unbookish ways.
Guilty as charged. And I know, I know.
Just like they said I would.
***
Rob Huffman has worked as a high school librarian for a couple of decades now. He’s married, with two kids. His fondest time-travel fantasy would be to play guitar with a punk band in CBGB, say in the mid-’70s.
