In the mid-2000s, I worked as a librarian in a large library in a small town, my first professional job after I finished university. On my first day, an older colleague sat me down and gave me what I came to think of as the librarian version of “The Talk”. She told me a lot of very practical stuff about personal safety while working in a customer-facing job and a lot of specifics about our library.
She ended with telling me:
Colleague: “You know the phrase, ‘There’s no such thing as a stupid question’? It’s not true. And you’re going to see a lot of proof of that.”
She was absolutely right; I saw a great many examples of this over my years there, but this was my favourite.
I was working on the reference desk one day when a middle-aged couple came in, asking for help using a computer to apply for a job. This was around the time that businesses were first starting to offer fully online applications, so this was a fairly frequent request.
I helped get them logged into a PC, and the man produced a piece of paper with the URL on it. After some attempts to get him to understand that touching the keys on the keyboard led to the letters appearing on the screen and that the letters he typed had to be the same ones, in the same order, as it said on the piece of paper, I resigned myself to being there for a while.
The job he wanted to apply for was with the local post office depot, organising and delivering post. One of the first questions on the application asked if the applicant had worked for the organisation before.
The man answered, “No,” by yelling it at the monitor.
I moved the mouse and keyboard over in front of me and selected the relevant box on the screen. The rest of the application continued in this way: him yelling and me typing. (Fortunately, it was a quiet weekday morning, so the noise wasn’t causing much of a disturbance.) I’m not sure if he ever understood that his shouting at the screen wasn’t what was making the answers appear in the form.
For each question, the man and woman would discuss what the answer should be, even when it was obvious, in the interests of what they thought would make a good impression on the prospective employer. They argued about whether he should include his middle name or just the initial, as the former might be seen as “posh” and the latter as too casual.
Man: “Should we give a different address to make it look like we live in a more expensive area of town?”
Woman: “And there’s only room for one phone number on the form!”
Man: “Hmm, we do always answer the home phone, but a mobile number might look cooler.”
Woman: “But you never answer your mobile!”
Man: “But it’ll look cooler!“
Me: “I think you should tell the truth, as it could harm your chances of getting the job or of hearing back from the interviewers if you don’t give accurate and straightforward information.”
I don’t think this ever sank in as they continued in this vein through the whole application.
With the form finally filled out, the man then demanded:
Man: “Go back through it! I’m sure I missed a question; the day of the week on which I was born.”
Me: “Usually only the date is given, not the day of the week, and you have the date filled in.”
Man: “But I need to include the day of the week! It’s very important for any employer to know that I was born on a Saturday!”
Me: “Sir, I’ve looked on the form, but there’s nowhere to add in any extra information.”
Man: “But they need to know I was born on a Saturday! ‘Saturday’s child works hard for a living!’ They need to know!”
This is a line from a nursery rhyme and, to my knowledge, has never been used as the basis for employment choices.
Woman: “You were born on a Monday.” *Peers at the screen* “And that isn’t your birth date. You got the day wrong.”
Man: “I put it as four days earlier, so it would be the date of a Saturday.”
It took me a few minutes to convince them that it was very unprofessional to put a false date of birth on a job application (as well as legally dodgy), and he finally accepted that he needed to put the real date, not four days earlier (which would not have been a Saturday either, though I decided not to start that fight).
Finally, it was all finished, and I clicked the submit button. After a little whirring, the message came up that the applicant’s information was very similar to that of a previous employee of the organisation, and that if this was incorrect, the applicant would need to contact them directly, or if the applicant had in fact worked for them before, they would need to fill in a slightly different version of the form.
Me: *Heart sinking and frustration rising* “Sir, are you sure you haven’t worked for the organisation before?”
Man: “I have, but it was a couple of years ago, so I feel it doesn’t count.”
I went back to the start of the application, against his continuing protests that it didn’t count, and click that he had worked for the organisation before. Fortunately, because they had been back and forth over their information so many times, I could recall quite a lot of it and got the form filled in quickly — though, at every turn, the man insisted that his previous employment didn’t count and that I would get in trouble for filling in the wrong form.
Eventually, I got him to confirm that all the information was correct and submitted the application. We got a message that it had been accepted and that the applicant would hear back in the next couple of weeks.
Just when I thought the ordeal was over:
Man: “Do you think they’ll know that I was fired?”
Me: “Fired? By who? By the post office?”
Man: “Yeah. The last time I worked for them, they fired me. But it was unjust.
I was dreading the answer but unable to let it lie.
Me: “…What was unjust?”
Man: “I went to prison and got fired for the same thing. It’s only allowed to be one or the other!”
Woman: “He went to prison for theft and got fired for theft! You can’t do both! He could sue!”
I didn’t have the strength to try and explain that an organisation that fired him and took legal action against him for stealing from them probably wasn’t going to want to employ him again, so I just told them to wait to hear back.
They got up and left the library, complaining to one another about the injustice of it all, with no word of thanks to me for having spent the last forty minutes helping them.
The same colleague who had given me “The Talk” months before noticed that I’d been helping the couple for a long time and helped a couple of reference desk patrons while I was busy. We took our break together and she asked me what had happened, so I explained. She looked thoughtful.
Colleague: “Was the man’s name [Man]?”
Me: *Surprised* “Yes! Do you know him?”
She laughed raucously for a couple of minutes and then calmed down enough to explain.
It turned out that, a few years ago, before I moved to the town, the local post depot had hired a few seasonal workers for the Christmas period, and they started getting complaints about parcels going missing. As a lot of expensive items were being taken, the police got involved.
The police realised that all the missing items had been allocated to one person for delivery, [Man], and visited his house only to see a huge pile of discarded, decaying boxes, envelopes, and wrapping paper just lying on the lawn in his back garden, easily visible from the front of the house.
He had taken any boxes that looked like they might contain gifts and any envelopes that felt like they could have cash in them, taken the goods, and dumped the packaging. He’d made no attempt to hide it or get rid of it. My colleague had a relative in the local police, who had told her quite a lot about it, including the fact that [Man] didn’t understand why this had been wrong as the depot had “given” the parcels to him.
Due to the value of the materials he’d stolen and, if I remember correctly, perjury charges, he spent about eighteen months in prison. It had been all over the local papers at the time, and there had been a lot of gossip about it, so it was unlikely he’d be able to get another job in the small town, let alone at the same company.
A few weeks later, I heard that the couple had come in on my day off and asked for further help with the application. They didn’t tell the staff member who assisted them about their previous adventure until the end of the process when they told her that he’d been turned down for the job but was trying again in the hope the thefts had been forgotten by now.
One of the things that I learned in my time in public libraries is that it’s a sad fact that, for whatever reasons, some people reach adulthood without the life skills needed to properly function, and often, places like the library are the only ones they can go to for help. Though I’ve since changed careers, I’ll never regret my time spent working in public libraries; even though it was often frustrating, bizarre, and scary, all the effort felt very worthwhile.
It might have helped that I WAS born on a Saturday.
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