I haven’t been writing much anywhere this week. I’ve been a bit depressed, and spent my spare time playing computer backgammon and watching old Britcoms. Now, however, I’m cheered up by one of the best perks of my job.
Some out there might think, hey, I bet it’s great to work as an academic librarian in the Ivy League! Well, yes, there are many advantages and I certainly appreciate them. I get to check out my library books for an entire year, for example. That’s pretty nice, I’m sure you would all agree. Oh, and every year I get an excellent tote bag with the library’s logo on it. And the burritos in the student union are tasty and very reasonably priced, or at least they were until the Mexican food stall was shut down last month because of the salmonella scare. [Note to self: check to see if it’s open again.] The best thing, though, is scavenging through the garbage after the students move out.
You see, a lot of the students have money, or at least their parents do. This is good for the tip jar I put out when I’m working the reference desk and also because even in their dorm rooms they have some nice stuff. Unfortunately, come moving out time (this week), they don’t have room to take all that stuff back, so it all gets piled up outside the dorms in big junk heaps. It’s the only time our usually beautiful campus looks like an abandoned refugee camp. But at least the rest of us benefit. I almost got to scavenge a new Mercedes that was parked next to the trash pile, but it turned out it belonged to a parent.
Still, I’m happy because I picked up a very nice floor lamp during the long walk to the parking garage. It has a wooden shaft and polished steel trim and actually works, so I don’t even have to rewire it. I’d been needing a good floor lamp, too, to replace the dilapidated one in my den that I’ve been carting around since I was in college. If I’d had a truck with me, and maybe another burly librarian, I could have come home with a sofa that would have been a huge improvement over the one in my den that I’ve been carting around since grad school. (As you can tell, my den is where all the old furniture from my impoverished student days goes. Now that I’m a prosperous librarian, I have furnished my living and dining rooms with that fancy Ikea furniture.)
The only problem I see now is that I’ve got a cheap, 20-year-old, brass floor lamp with a broken plastic shade sitting in my house and nothing to do with it. Perhaps I can take it to work with me tomorrow and replace the one in the junk pile. It seems the least I could do to show my gratitude.
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