Update on Mentorship

Here it is in all its glory, The Lewis Library and Technology Center

I have been working at the Lewis Library for a little more than a month now in the children's section. It's sort of like trying to sort through a dictionary the size of a small house and never being able to sit down for a break. Oddly enough, I still enjoy it (tiresome as it is) and I've started to refer to the books as my children.

Some difficulties I have encountered during my time here:

1) The bloody nonfiction section. I absolutely detest those horrible shelves of doom and pain. Just imagine putting an entire stores worth of clothes into your closet and trying to sort it by its shade of color. Now you have an idea of what the nonfiction section is like. I spend about an hour desperately trying to shelve a cart full of books by decimal points that go as far as the thousands. When I finish, I feel like crying because I'll turn around see that someone just dumped their pile of books onto my cart.

2) Children are strange. Something that I have noticed is that they are intimidated by me, despite the fact that I look 12. Whenever I have a cart, I see a few kids looking at it from afar as if they desperately need to know what's on it. If I ever talk to them directly to explain that they can look at the cart if they want, they scramble. So, since I have to cooperate and help as much as I can,I have devised a system. I leave the cart at the end of an isle near the kid and walk away with a couple of books. As they slowly drift towards the cart, I pretend to be busy with the books. I continue to straighten already straightened books or re-shelve some stragglers until they're satisfied and then I take back the cart and continue whatever it was that I was doing before.

3)  I was just minding my own business in the D section when it happened. You see, you can look through the shelve, past the books, into the next isle. Well, in the next isle (The C section) there was a boy about 7 years old. He hadn't noticed me but he was looking around like he didn't want to get caught so I watched to see what he was doing. He pulled out a pencil from his pocket and pushed it behind some books on the shelve directly in front of me. He checked again that he was safe, smiled, then walked away. Honestly, children are weird.