In general I enjoy working in a library; now that I have gotten out of the madhouse computer lab, it is a quiet environment, and of course I have easy access to books (although our collection is not that great).
However, it was not until working in Technical Services that I grasped how much
waste a library produces. I shudder to think how much waxed paper alone we throw out (the backing of the many labels that go on the many, many items). Then there's the fact that we print out the item record for every new item when it is first entered - a cart full of books is 50-70 sheets of paper, bam. (We do re-use what we can but there's just no getting around the fact that we use a lot of new sheets, partly because the large numbers produced in this fashion are not themselves reusable.) At the end of the process that goes in the recycle bin (this
is California, after all), but still I feel very bad about doing it in the first place.
Myself in particular, I discard tons of unrecyclable packing material (such as styrofoam padding inserts and shrinkwrap that B&T puts around stacks of books to keep them together in transit). I'm to the point where I tear the plastic window out of every envelope and throw just that in the trash, so I can recycle the actual paper of the envelope. Don't even get me started on what happens when we discard items that aren't saleable in the book sale. Overall the waste production is just hideous. I don't want to do this for a living. I used to have stress every day; now I have guilt.
This brings me to the conclusion that one characteristic of my hypothetical ideal job would have to be that it in fact cleans up or reduces waste somehow, rather than generating it. I want to work somewhere that has a positive environmental impact, or a minimal one, instead of an obvious negative one.
This got me onto the thought-thread of "what other characteristics would an ideal job for me need to have?" and I can think of several:
- Physical activity. 40-hour work weeks make it difficult to get exercise outside of the work day; there's hardly any time left.* Putting the exercise somehow inside the work day seems like a good way to handle it. After all, one of the reasons so many Americans are overweight is the prevalence of sit-down jobs of many types, rather than daily physical labour of some type like most people had to do years ago. I'm not talking about wanting to be a labourer here, but just something with a lot less sitting down than I currently do.
- Minimal interaction with other people. I like to be by myself, or have only a few people I work with. Having to deal with a large number of people every day drives me crazy, especially if they are not fellow employees, but "customers" of some type.
- Aforementioned negative relation to waste production.
So what should I be? A park ranger? *laughs*
* - Of course the better solution is to somehow not have to work a regular job, whether by making a living at something scheduleless and unconventional (e.g. art), having sufficient investment income, managing to live entirely off the land, etc. (and the really truly better solution is to change the entire culture so that
no one has to have a "regular job" unless that's what they truly enjoy), but short of that...
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