>In a message dated 8/30/99 11:08:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
>> I washed toilets in Ithaca while in graduate school
>
>Beats our dishes. Maura should get a BP prize now. Any suggestions?
>
>][<en
>
If you are looking for odd dirty jobs for the young, I was a "Book Mover" at
the Cornell U. Library on Saturdays during high school years.   A dirtier
and more "shocking" job is hard to imagine.   Many of the books needing to
be moved appeared to have been sitting on the shelves for decades of
decades.   If heavy-duty mechanics end up smelling like diesel oil, book
movers end up smelling like 100 years of book dust.

The task was due to the fact that the book collection was larger than the
available shelf space, but library administrators counted on the fact that a
portion would always be checked out.   The collection was a bit like an
amoeba, shifting form as trends in research waxed and waned.   A typical
task for the three man book moving crew which worked every Saturday would be
to move half the books in the East Wing of the 8th Floor to the North Wing
of the 3rd Floor, then pick up half the books in the West Wing of the 2nd
Floor and carry them to the open space on the 8th Floor.   Progress was
measured by the stack between your outstretched arms and your chin.

The problem was that the old library was built with a cast iron frame, 1"
thick glass plate floors and spiral cast iron stairways.   Walking on the
glass floors with the right kind (wrong kind) of shoes you built up a
tremendous charge of static electricity.   Then, when you reached for an
armload of books on from the iron shelf units, great sparks illuminated the
dim aisles.   We invented devices made from coat hangers wrapped around our
ankels and sticking out a foot so as we walked along the aisles the
electricity was gently released as the antenna bumped on row after row of
shelf supports.  We all looked a bit like space creatures with antenna.
The down side was that the gentle tinkling of book movers echoing throughout
the hallowed library assured the boss that we were busy.   This proved a
severe limitation to the book movers' interest in sneaking off to the
semi-secret "locked press" where rare and questionable books were kept.

Cuyler