I was too ashamed of the actual reason that I was doing community
service to tell the nice lady at the library why I needed to do some
work for six hours and then have her sign me a note. I told her it
was for a scout project and that I wanted to help out. The library
had moved from the old city building on main street up to an
abandoned wing of what we called the 'old school' . I was a building
that had been deemed too dangerous for the kiddies so they put the
library and the old folks in there instead. The library had just been
put in boxes waiting to have the 12 years of neglect cleaned out of
the old building and then to be re-shelved. I was going to serve my
dad mandated duty on a day when the part time librarian was stacking
the books onto the shelves of the old school library. She lined me
out with some apple boxes full of books that probably had never been
read in the old library and would probably go unread in this one and
told me to stack them in alphabetical order. As with any task I
undertake I am commuted to doing it as fast and as efficiently as
possible as a matter of personality defect, perhaps it is my German
heritage. I started systematically laying out the shelves with
letters and then placing the books in each as quickly as I could. I
had made the classic amateur librarian mistake of giving each letter
a shelf when there are very few books that start with 'Q' and 'Z'.
After a few systemic shifts I was really tearing through the books at
a tremendous rate, I was trying to stack a box every ten minutes and
I was getting really close. Our part time librarian was getting a
little nervous that my pace to too rapid to be properly sorting the
books so she told me to stop for a bit while she checked to make sure
I was not just slopping them up. I was offended. I had a system and I
was wicked good at putting books where they went. She scrutinized for
a long couple of minutes and could find no defect in my work but
admonished me to go slow, be careful and do it right. I was so
irritated that she would tell me to slow down when I was doing it
right at warp speed that I did no more meaningful work for the rest
of the day until my six hours was up. She gave me a signed note
skeptically and I was off to buy my freedom with a scrap of paper
from a lady who preferred slow correct work to fast.
