Keeping Up Appearances

It's been a week of dress shirts and ties.  A woman from the Information Use Management & Policy Institute at Florida State wanted my thoughts on a hurricane preparedness web site they are developing for libraries, and I was on a hiring committee for an IP position in my department.  I had to to look un-scruffy, (i.e. do some ironing).

Painful, these days, to be on a hiring committee, to be an up or down thumb.  It's a buyer's market, and scores of people don't even get interviewed.  Of the ones who do, if you could, you would hire them all.  They want only to put their shoulders to the wheel.

It's hard for young people, with we cursed boomers hanging around so interminably.  But I remember myself, thinking about the old reference staff, motoring down country roads on the bookmobile, "Will they ever leave, retire, die?".  And they did.  And here I am, where they were.