If I had to describe my employment history in one word, it’d be strange. It started out pretty normal, when I was 15 I was a dishwasher at the same restaurant as my brothers but that came to an abrupt end over the course of a few hours where my brothers and I all got fired, rehired, and quit in the span of 3 hours. All stemming from me having a tennis match scheduled for Mother’s Day.
From that point on it got weird. I was a librarian for 2 years, a brief stint as a tennis instructor, a few summers teaching kids how to make candles at a nature preserve, the summer after high school I was painting fire hydrants, a few more doing landscaping, a couple years in a mail room, a summer as a locomotive engineer in bum fuck no where Pennsylvania, and now I sell boilers. My LinkedIn is a like a madlibs filled out in a drunken stupor. Last week I got offers for jobs as a middle school English teacher, product developer for Ford, and agender stripper. I have a try out at The Cashmere Dragon next Tuesday.
Today’s tale brings us back to the first one, my days as a librarian. My junior and senior years in high school were funded by my 20 hours a week at the local community library, and yes it’s fair to ask yourself “what kind of dude in high school is a librarian?” Answer: Ya boy over here. Let me tell ya, working in a library is a sweet deal. While you chumps were slaving away cleaning plates, saving fat kids from drowning while their parents had poolside limearitas, and asking paper or plastic. I was chilling in a library doing nothing. The only people who go to public libraries are old people who have been going there for decades and know where everything is and families where the parents don’t give a shit and the kids just flock to where ever the brightest colors are.
The only other people who worked there were grandmas who retired and were just looking to kill some time and fund their Wednesday night bingo habits. Grandmas are the best when they’re not showing the era they grew up in and dropping little breadcrumbs of racism, they’re always happy and every time they see you reset the wifi they make you feel like Albert Einstein. Plus it turns out a bunch of them had seasons tickets to Syracuse Basketball since the 80’s so we’d just pass the time debating Scoop vs Triche.
Everything about my time as a librarian I look back on rather fondly, except one thing. I was a librarian from 2012 to 2014, take a moment and really try to remember what was hot in the literary streets back then. Go ahead, take your time… Around this time was the great sexual awakening for middle aged suburban moms across the country thanks to 50 Shades of Grey.
Listen, I’m all for you doing you and if Mrs. Jones wants to draw a bubble bath, pour a tall glass of Merlot and have some personal time go right ahead. She earned it. Being a mother is the hardest job there is, besides being an agender stripper at The Cashmere Dragon. But there’s a point where this flipped from a fun trend to downright creepy and my personal line on that was when I was processing 50 copies of these books a day. If you think reading about mild BDSM is a good time then I have some links that would make you need a cigarette after just seeing the URL. Hit me up and I’ll pass them along @LlFired. It didn’t help that the 50 Shades books would always come back strategically hidden in a stack of 20 children’s books, like a modern day Trojan Horse. I know you weren’t wrangling up the Captain Underpants anthology and your version of Captain Underpants just happened to be laying on the same floor. Those were two separate collection periods, I know it, you know it, no shame in the game so let that freak flag fly.
One freak flag flew WAY too high when some depraved sexual monster decided to return a copy of 50 Shades Freed with what looked like a strawberry fruit rollup in a zip-lock bag sticking out of the top of the book. *Pause, the mystery bookmark was placed roughly midway through the story. Why? Did they sense the denouement wasn’t going to get them across the goal line so they decided to walk away and let their mind fill in the blanks for the time being and then go back for the sake of the plot? Did they hammer out about 200 pages of soft core erotica in a single session? This is what keeps me up at night. Resume* I can’t put a book back on the shelf with a bookmark still in it, that’s just not professional. So as a professional I pulled the place holder from it’s location and the bag felt a little oily to the touch. A closer inspection revealed that in my hand was a strawberry flavored dental dam. The oily feel was a result of the strawberry residue seeping through the bag and now my hand smelled like an old jolly rancher, it still does ever so faintly.
Now is when I’ll take a moment to fill in anyone who missed that one day in 8th grade health class where we got the Lisa Ann sexual starter kit. You remember it right? The paper bag with 3 lifestyle condoms in the colors of traffic lights, an unflavored dental dam (because if it was flavored then we’d have all been eating pink meat for lunch that day) and a single serve ketchup packet of lube you convinced the dumb kid to put on his chicken tenders. So dental dams are basically a piece of saran wrap you put over your consenting ladies business because you can’t eat gluten and she loaded up on bread sticks at Olive Garden. I’m pretty sure that’s how that works. No one is really certain about their true function because if someone has one in their personal possession outside of the one day in health class they’re a certified psychopath.
That brings us to this existential quandary, how did the dental dam end up in the book? The only possible reason I can think of without delving into the possibility of minors reading mild erotica, FBI please don’t break down my door (this actually happened with the previous owner of my parents house and now there’s a dent in the front door), is that there is some woman roaming CNY with such an excess of strawberry dental dams that they just have to find ways to use them or else their house will turn into a scene from hoarders with mountains of them piling up. Like beer distributor that uses boxes of damaged bud light to construct their furniture. One things for certain, this persons a menace to society and needs to be stopped. If you see something, say something.
Holla at ya boy
Twitter: @LlFired
I'll Probably Get Fired For This 