Five Minute Friday :: Extra

• Five Minute Friday :: Extra Linkup

My first ever job was working as an extra at a nearby branch of the public library. You probably know about part-time, often after school, usually teens who shelve books, often check out books and other materials customers / patrons / whatever local parlance calls it borrow. Back then audio-visuals (as they called them) were less sophisticated than they are these days—mostly compact discs and movies. Back in those days, we had actual card catalogs.

I began in the summer before my junior year or grade 11 with the maximum 30 hours a week the law allowed for someone my age. When school classes resumed in the fall, I started working about twenty hours a week, which included two evenings until closing at 9 pm and Saturdays from 9 am to 1 pm.

That's a long intro before I tell you although our job title was extras, I believe pages is more typically used to describe this essential library help. Besides, how cool to give those workers the same name we have for parts of the books they deal with?

At our location, some of the teenage extras helped with story hour. I learned to mend books, a skill some individuals, some libraries, and some other related entities could use these days. Because shelving books was an essential part of what we did, we learned quite a bit about the Dewey Decimal System used to organize them, though there are other ways to categorize reading material and from my understanding, the library system I worked for later switched all its branches to LC, or Library of Congress.

That concludes another chapter of Life Stuff on this blog. Thanks for reading!

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