AI Could Never... Do My Library Job

Today I am celebrating one year as an Essex County Council employee - again!

I did this for the first time back in May 2015. I’ll never forget the tempestuous circumstances surrounding my employment there the first time the year before that, with Essex Music Services (later Essex Music Education Hub, or some such title). I was temping for a property company and responded to a particularly acid-toned email from my manager with my notice. A highly recommended approach, by the way, for maximum grumpy impact. I Googled ‘jobs for musicians’ without much hope, and was lucky beyond lucky to discover that not only did the Essex Music Service exist, they were also hiring. From that, I gained two incredibly special friends that I have kept to this day. A good use of Google, by anyone’s standards, and I didn’t even need the AI Summary function for it. Funny that.

Of course, that was twelve years ago now. I worked there for two and a half years before running away to Dublin, getting divorced by post, completing my M.Phil. in Irish Writing at Trinity College and then writing The Walk throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. By that time I was working at the recently-closed University of Essex Southend campus, administrating acting students and hearing such sentences following a knock at my door as, “Oh hi, I’m Lydia, I’m here for the blood?” and “Emma, yeah.. Do you have, like, a long thing… maybe two long things actually, that we could pretend are broadswords for about half an hour?” And would you believe, I actually did.

The software that is Tilly Norwood would never be that funny.

Anyway, when the inevitable ‘how in creation am I going to get my child to school for 8.45am in Hockley but open the office for 8.30am in Southend and still be there at 4pm but also pick her up at 3.10pm back in Hockley’ question arose, it felt like the right time to step up the PhD to full time and find something part time, and closer to home (especially as our childcare bill was about to reduce from a second mortgage to practically zero, and not before time). As if by magic, a passing comment about ‘if the library is ever hiring please call me’ turned into a start date exactly one year ago today - and I didn’t even have to acid-tone anyone myself this time.

SInce I started, a great many changes have occurred, mostly due to a change in administration (one might say, regime, if one was being facetious which of course one would NEVER) but also some general internal stuff, like long-standing employees leaving for a better life which is the epitome of unbelievable rudeness, of course. Probably one of the biggest changes I’ve observed is the sheer scale of people coming in to deposit leaflets and posters for their businesses and events, all made with that tell-tale, overly-bubbly ChatGPT aesthetic, if you could even credit it as such. The work laptops, Windows-powered, all had an update with super-powerful Microsoft Co-Pilot tools and I have absolutely no idea what I’d even use them for. AI is everywhere, and I hate it so much. The vague thought that even one of the books on our very lovely populated bookshelves in the library might soon be written by, or even assisted by AI, makes me feel quite sick.

But here’s some things I’ve done as a ‘Customer Services Assistant’ (I am not a librarian, officially, which is a shame, although I absolutely professionally identify as one) that AI absolutely could not touch, which is why the library will always be a place of safety, refuge and proper information for as long as communities fight to keep them open.

1. Hunted through three trugs’ worth of books to find a lost bookmark.

The little scan-y thing that stops the security barriers bleeping like reversing trucks are all very well but when you accidentally leave a ‘Best Grandma’ bookmark that is the same width as wafer-thin ham for some reason in a Lucinda Riley that you returned yesterday, there isn’t a machine in the world that is going to find that. Luckily, though, I have just the sort of robust knees from being a practicing Catholic these past thirteen years that meant kneeling on the floor for an indeterminate amount of time wasn’t an issue. It was in trug no. #3 of 5, so obviously, the time spent praying has been worth it.

2. Hugged two widows, one widower and one bereaved dad.

It is absolutely extraordinary how much admin a person is expected to do immediately on the death of a loved one. One widow had only been such for a week when she came in to try and print a return label for something her husband had bought, because she needed the money from the refund, because funerals are expensive. We printed the label, sure, but we hugged and we cried and talked about their child, who is eight. The bereaved dad was photocopying his son’s death certificate ten months after his suicide because the admin literally never stops. The library is a safe and quiet place to do the unthinkable, like photocopying death certificates you wish with all your heart didn’t need to exist. We talked about it. I ‘forgot’ to charge him for the copies and paid it myself later.

3. Hi-jacked a conversation about plays with a reading group and sent them off with a list of Brian Friel plays they’d never heard of.

Literally the only benefit of having spent tens of thousands of pounds on my education is the ability to produce the most bizarre but incredibly accurate information at just the right moment. The validity of the moment is not up for question, by the way. Our library - like most libraries - runs several book clubs and one of them is a specific branch of a U3A organisation who read exclusively plays. I happened to meet the poor lady whose duty it is to come into the library and drop off and pick up copies, and she said it was hard to find plays with not too many parts to read because there wasn’t that many of them in the group. Cue my emerging with the proverbial baseball bat to beat her over the head with Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Translations. She’d never heard of Friel. A Google search for small cast plays does not mention Friel - but this absolute anorak does.

4. Made cups of tea for a family with a five-day-old newborn because their toddler son really, REALLY wanted to go to the library.

This speaks for itself and the dad all but behaved as if I’d handed him a blank cheque. Mum was breastfeeding so she had to decline but having had a newborn, and not even with a toddler at the same time, human recognise human.

AI COULD NEVER.

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