Have I ever told you…I was a nerd in high school? – June 16, 2009

Today we got to go on a tour of the library. It’s only three floors and pretty easy to figure out compared to any college library that we interns are used to, but we still had a 45 minute block for a tour of it. This was good though because it allowed for me to come to two conclusions about life:
1. Ohrstrom Library is the reason I cannot get work done at Dartmouth.
2. I honestly, really was a nerd in high school.
Explanation for the first is because the SPS library is honestly SO NICE that I was just absolutely spoiled during my time here. I blame its niceness for my inability to work in any subpar location. (Subpar meaning: not a sound-proof individual study carol with a PC and typewriter that overlooks Lower School Pond and has just the right amount of “school history” to look through during study breaks.) Yeah…this is pretty much why Baker/Berry just hasn’t been cutting it for me. My brain is picky.

As to the second point… so there we were, 19 interns sitting on the overly comfy leather couches (does Dartmouth even own these!?) in the main room of the library being told what our “Library duties” would consist of (I’ll probably have more to say about this once I have them…but NO FACEBOOK ALWAYS WORKING seems to be the main idea.) when I saw the reference librarian kinda scanning the room to see if she recognized anybody. She passed over me – and then came back (I had long blonde hair then, I excuse her) and immediately cut off the other librarian that was talking to exclaim “ELI!! How are you!?!” revealing to the whole group that I spent so much time in the library when I was here that the reference librarian recognizes me and remembers my name four years later.* As if this wasn’t embarrassing enough – because the first few days with the interns you see is all about coming off as cool and fitting in – she asked me to show the group the way to the public computers. After this fairly easy task was done, she tried to include others in the tour by asking me to introduce her to “my friend in the Iowa sweatshirt.”

This is where it gets really bad…because “my friend in the Iowa sweatshirt” happened to be Matt de la Pena who happened to also go to St. Paul’s. Further driving home the point to the rest of the interns that, no, she’s not just really good with names…that really just was how much time I spent in the library during my time here.

Today we also had a rather epic waffle ball game. But I sincerely hope that there will be so many more of those to come that I’m not doing the sport a disservice by not giving it a full mention in this update.


*Please note how throughout this I referred to her as the reference librarian…because I still don’t remember/know her name. She is super nice though. Huge fan.