Nature Abhors Kilmartin

Lois wasn't at Kilmartin, but she was there. The place reeked of her, from the timid, suspicious employees to the books packed tighter on the shelves than the stick up the library's ass. A great, smothering Lois blanket. A personality vacuum. By the time I was done with that boring day I was exhausted, starved for humanity.

The Kilmartin staff ranged from annoying to grotesque with a ltttle nice thrown in. I encountered the grotesque first. Katie, the branch manager, strode toward me leaning back, right arm stick straight, hand like a cleaver pointing at me, as with a foil, preparing for duel. I couldn't tell if her shoulders were padded by her blouse or surgically augmented with half a broomstick. The closer she got the more pronounced the grotesquerie: Her face was skinless, covered entirely with flesh-colored spackling; when she spoke it was without the least genuineness, betrayed by the intonation of a local newscaster appallingly but obliviously misapprehending what she's reading. My repulsion, which could not have been writ more boldly across my face, she didn't read at all. She introduced me to everyone except the reference librarian, even though he interrupted our tour of the facilities to let her know one of the maintenance guys was in the mechanical room.

Christie showed me the RFID setup. It wasn't rocket science. I didn't have trouble with it all day, but I couldn't tell that it was any more efficient than the old way, except that relatively fewer patrons came to the desk to check out, preferring instead to use the self-check. Christie was okay--not on the annoying end of the scale, and cutish in an artsy way--though every time our eyes met she would say, "Hi," with a tiny forced smile. So I tried not to make eye contact, though I looked at her at every opportunity. She was several inches shorter than I, but her hands seemed larger than my own, and were somewhat beaten, rough and a bit scarred, the skin shiny but creased, like chair leather.

Cheryl was the annoying one. Around me, she seemed to think that I cared about everything she was doing, and would rationalize every one of her actions. I couldn't have cared less about anything she was doing, especially after she expressed shock over my not flipping through each book before I discharged it.

On the circulation desk there were no chairs, and reading was not allowed (books, books everywhere! and not a word to read!), both contrary to what I'm used to, and the desk shifts were ninety minutes long, not sixty as at my branch. I paced along the padded padded mat from one terminal to the other; I poked in the drawers, but everything was so geometrically aligned I was afraid to touch anything; I perused what slivers of sky I could see through the skylights. I did one card registration, wondering all the while what Lois would find wrong with it.

Shelving and shelf-reading were supposed to be done concurrently, not discretely. I shelf-read the shelves on which I placed books, and hoped that that was what was meant, because I wasn't going to do any more than that, opting to get all the books on the shelf with which I came out on the floor. All of the bookends were shoved so hard against the books that it was difficult to squeeze a book in or pull one out, despite the room on the shelf.

I could not get out of there soon enough, and was probably the first one to the car though I was parked much the furthest away. I was already regretting I'd applied for the position there.